While my constant research for pipeline tools, I have found a fantastic security scanner for Docker images. Something you could use quickly under the topic of CI/CD and DevSecOps for your development. It’s named anchore/grype and the best it’s Open source, really fast and delivers many nice options for reports.

Requirements

• Docker installed (to pull images)

Hint: You also can load and scan *.tar archives.

Objective

Short introduction in installation and usage of Grype (locally to evaluate).

Note: The later integration into your pipelines shouldn’t be a problem. I will add the Grype repository to my watchlist and for sure try it out in my pipelines.

Installation and default configuration

This first step should only take a few minutes.

# install the latest version to /usr/local/bin
$ curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anchore/grype/main/install.sh | sh -s -- -b /usr/local/bin

# install the latest version to ~/Downloads
$ curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anchore/grype/main/install.sh | sh -s -- -b ~/Downloads

# move binary to /usr/local/bin/grype (if you define different location)
$ mv ~/Downloads/grype /usr/local/bin/grype

# create configuration file
$ vim ~/.grype.yaml

# show help
$ grype --help

I copied the content in short form from the official GitHub repository. You can adapt this to your needs at any time.

check-for-app-update: true
fail-on-severity: ''
output: "table"
scope: "squashed"
quiet: false
db:
  auto-update: true
  cache-dir: "~/.grype/db"
  update-url: "https://toolbox-data.anchore.io/grype/databases/listing.json"
log:
  file: ""
  level: "error"
  structured: false

Prepare the database

The Anchore Feed Service provides regular updates about publicly available vulnerabilities. In this section I will guide you to derive the updates manually.

# check database status (optional)
$ grype db status

# check feed service for new updates
$ grype db check

# run database update
$ grype db update

# verify db files (optional)
$ ls -la ~/.grype/db/

Usage examples

Even as the usage of Grype is very simple, here some short examples.

# scan image with configuration settings
$ grype node

# scans for vulnerabilities on all image layer and set output format
$ grype --scope all-layers -o cyclonedx node

# stop if a severity high is found with exit code 1
$ grype --fail-on high node

# show last exit status (optional)
$ echo $?

To stop your validation/pipeline on certain severities of security risks (exit code 1), you can choose between following options: negligible, low, medium, high & critical.

Hint: To save the reports you could use the redirect, to the output stream to a file.

Clean up

Don’t forget to clean up your system!

# list all Docker images (optional)
$ docker images

# delete specific Docker image by name
$ docker rmi node