FRESH
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Hacker News Hacker NewsChainguard came to this first (arguably by accident since they had several other offerings before they realized that people would pay (?!!) for a image that reported zero CVEs).
In a previous role, I found that the value for this for startups is immense. Large enterprise deals can quickly be killed by a security team that that replies with "scanner says no". Chainguard offered images that report 0 CVEs and would basically remove this barrier.
For example, a common CVE that I encountered was a glibc High CVE. We could pretty convincingly show that our app did not use this library in way to be vulnerable but it didn't matter. A high CVE is a full stop for most security teams. Migrated to a Wolfi image and the scanner reported 0. Cool.
But with other orgs like Minimus (founders of Twistlock) coming into this it looks like its about to be crowded.
There is even a govt project called Ironbank to offer something like this to the DoD.
Net positive for the ecosystem but I don't know if there is enough meat on the bone to support this many vendors.
Where? Lets take a random example: https://hub.docker.com/hardened-images/catalog/dhi/traefik
Ok, where is the source? Open source means I can build it myself, maybe because I'm working in an offline/airgapped/high compliance environment.
I found a "catalogue" https://github.com/docker-hardened-images/catalog/blob/main/... but this isn't a build file, it's some... specialized DHI tool to build? Nothing https://github.com/docker-hardened-images shows me docs where I can build it myself or any sort of "dhi" tool.
A big part of this for us is transparency. That’s why every image ships with VEX statements, extensive attestations, and all the metadata you need to actually understand what you’re running. We want this to be a trustworthy foundation, not just a thinner base image.
We’re also extending this philosophy beyond base images into other content like MCP servers and related components, because the more of the stack that is verifiable and hardened by default, the better it is for the ecosystem.
A few people in the thread asked how this is sustainable. The short answer is that we do offer an enterprise tier for companies that need things like contractual continuous patching SLAs, regulated-industry variants (FIPS, etc.), and secure customizations with full provenance and attestations. Those things carry very real ongoing costs, so keeping them in Enterprise allows us to make the entire hardened catalog free for the community.
Glad to see the conversation happening here. We hope this helps teams ship software with a stronger security posture and a bit more confidence.
With Bitnami discontinuing their offer, we recently switched to other providers. For some we are using a helm chart and this new offer provides some helm charts but for some software just the image. I would be interested to give this a try but e.g. the python image only various '(dev)' images while the guide mentions the non-dev images. So this requires some planning.
EDIT: Digging deeper, I notice it requires a PAT and a PAT is bound to a personal account. I guess you need the enterprise offering for organisation support. I am not going to waste my time to contact them for an enterprise offer for a small start-up. What is the use case for CVE hardened images that you cannot properly run in an CICD and only on your dev machine? Are there companies that need to follow compliance rules or need this security guarantee but don't have CICD in place?
1. 'generous' initial offering to establish a userbase/ecosystem/network-effect
2. "oh teehee we're actually gonna have to start charging for that sorry we know that you've potentially built a lot of your infrastructure around this thing"
3. $$$
Our view is that this was largely a marketing maneuver by Docker aimed at disrupting Chainguard’s momentum.
The deeper issue in the container security space is a lack of genuine innovation. Most offerings are incremental (and offer inferior) variations on what Chainguard has already proven.
When Chainguard’s funding round last February drew significant industry attention, it triggered a rush into “secure images” as a category. We know because VCs have been reaching out to us incessantly. That, in turn, pushed Bitnami to attempt monetization of what had historically been free images, and Docker to offer free images to fill the vacuum Bitnami left following their attempt to monetize.
We were monitoring Docker closely and suspect that following their "Docker Hardened Images" splash they realized it was a lot harder to sell into the industry than they initially realized.
The reason source code is rarely shared in this space is straightforward: once it's open-sourced, a meaningful barrier to entry to the hardened image industry largely disappears.
Truthfully, at current prices you're 100% paying for quality of life. From all public pricing figures I've seen, it's cheaper to build hardened images, in-house than to buy from a vendor.
Our offering at VulnFree is technically priced below the cost to build in-house, but our real value add is meeting dev teams where they are per our custom hardened images.
Meanwhile, nix already has packaged more software than any other distro, and the vast majority of its software can be put into a container image with no additional dependencies (i.e. "hardened" in the same way as these are) with exactly zero extra work specific to each package.
The nixpkgs repository already contains the instructions to build and isolate outputs, there's already a massive cache infrastructure setup, builds are largely reproducible, and docker will have to make all of that for their own tool to reach parity... and without a community behind it like nix has.
Offering image hardening to custom images looks like a reasonable way for Docker to have a source of sustained income. Regulated industries like banks, insurers, or governmental agencies are likely interested.
There's a "Make a request" button, but it links to this 404-ing GitHub URL: https://github.com/docker-hardened-images/discussion/issues
oh well. hope its good stuff otherwise.
But, we pay for support already.
Nice from docker!
None of the alternatives come anywhere close to what we needed to satisfy a threat model that trusts no single maintainer or computer, so we started over from actually zero.
From scratch is ideal, distroless is great too
Then use firewalls around your containers as needed
https://github.com/docker-hardened-images/catalog?tab=readme...
What about a safer container ecosystem without Docker?
Podman solved rootless containers and everything else under the sun by now.
All docker is doing is playing catch-up.
But guess what? They are obsolete. It's just time until they go the way of HashiCorp's Vagrant.
Docker is only making money of enterprise whales by now, and eventually that profit will dry up, too.
If you are still relying on docker, it is time to migrate.