5 Steps For Shift-Left Container Security -

Table of Contents

Introduction:

When your services are saved on the servers, it becomes very important to ensure their confidentiality. In such a situation, it becomes very significant to secure the containerized applications.

If you are a newcomer to container security or a network security player, the following article is going to be handy for you. In this guide, we will entail different steps to ensure maximum security.

Steps For Shift-Left Container Security:

The following are the steps for shift left container security:

Step 01: Integrate Code Scanning at the CI/CD Process

In this process, any known issues or vulnerabilities are detected and action is taken against them. Using zero cve images in this procedure is also an important task. Now remember that you can do scanning at any of the following stages:

Dependencies
Secure Container Images
Cloud configuration
Code
Infrastructure as Code
Hosts

By using this technique, you can easily ensure docker image security and make the whole network totally secure.

Step 02: Reduce External Vulnerabilities via Dependency Scanning

Only very minimal and toy applications are free of third-party libraries or frameworks. However, reusing code from external dependencies means you will be including bugs and vulnerabilities from these dependencies as part of your application. Dependency scanning should be included as a best practice in any application build process.

Here, different tools can be used. These include Snyk which offers software composition analysis (SCA). It further leads to identifying 3rd party dependencies. When it comes to matching vulnerability databases with application dependencies, you can use various package management tools, such as npm, maven, go, etc.

Step 03: Use Image Scanning To Analyze Container Images

In the third step, you need to pack the application that is built in a container. This container must have a minimal set of libraries, zero CVE images, various configuration files, and dependent frameworks (such as Python, Node, etc.).

Use an image scanner to analyze your container images. The image scanning tool will discover vulnerabilities in the operating system packages (rpm, dpkg, apk, etc.) provided by the container image base distribution. It will also reveal vulnerabilities in package dependencies for Java, Node, Python, and others, even if you didn’t apply dependency scanning in the previous stages.

Step 04: Enforce Image Content Trust

It becomes very significant to apply image verification and signing when it comes to ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the zero cve images. Coming to the procedure now, you need to sign the images digitally. This ensures that the pictures are not tampered.

Key Steps:

Signing the Image: You can sign the image by using either a self-signed certificate or a trusted signing authority. This way, a digital signature can be prepared that is attached to the image.
Verifying the Image: Before deploying an image, verify its signature to confirm its authenticity and integrity. This ensures that the image hasn’t been modified or replaced with a malicious version. By enforcing image content trust, you can significantly reduce the risk of deploying compromised or malicious container images.

Step 05: Implement Runtime Security

No matter how secure the environment you have created, it is still necessary to secure the zero cve images during the actual runtime application. To do this, you can do the following:

Network Segmentation

Even with robust security measures in place, it’s essential to monitor and protect your containers during runtime. Here are some key strategies for runtime security: