Container security often focuses on runtime best-practices while neglecting delivery of the software in the supply chain. Application, library, and OS vulnerabilities are a likely route to data exfiltration; emerging technologies in the container ecosystem offer a new opportunity to mitigate this risk. Treating containers as immutable artifacts and injecting configuration allows us to “upgrade” images by rebuilding and shipping whole software bundles, avoiding configuration drift and state inconsistencies. This makes it possible to constantly patch software, and to easily enforce governance of artifacts both pre- and post-deployment.

In this talk, we detail an ideal, security-hardened container supply chain, describe the current state of the ecosystem, and dig into specific tools like Grafeas, Kritis, in-toto, Clair, Micro Scanner, TUF, and Notary. We’ll also demo how to gate container image pipelines and deployments on cryptographically verified supply chain metadata.