black-hat-rust VS distroless

Bonuses: If you purchase Cloudflare for Speed and Security before November 4, 2023, you'll get my bestseller, Black Hat Rust, for free! Yes, you read it right, two books for less than the price of one!

Hey HN,

I'm so excited to finally share with you what I've been working on recently.

One month ago I asked my audience what they wanted to learn about Websites, APIs and Servers security [0].

From the feedback, I've identified a few recurring pain points that I've started to address (and many more) in this new book.

From theory to practice, you will learn how low-level network and security protocols work. How to configure Cloudflare to secure and scale your web applications. How to create serverless applications and which database to chose with serverless functions. How to optimize your caching policies. How to distribute videos globally. And a lot of other things, all of that while significantly reducing your cloud bill.

Today, the book is far from ready, but I still wanted to release it as "Early Access". First, to enable you to start learning today and, secondly, to garner feedback and refine the book's content.

Between writing, editing, and technical reviewing, it can take some time to complete a book. That's why I release my books before they are fully completed - so you can commence learning before the book is 100% ready, provide feedback, and help shape the content. Rest assured, all future updates are free of charge.

The final publication date is set for mid-January 2024.

Bonuses: If you purchase Cloudflare for Speed and Security before November 4, 2023, you'll get my bestseller, Black Hat Rust [1], for free! Yes, you read it right, two books for less than the price of one!

Furthermore, all early-access supporters will receive the checklist I use to quickly set up a new domain on Cloudflare, ensuring the right balance between security, performance, and user experience.

Lastly, the price is likely to increase once the book transitions out of Early Access, so don't postpone getting your copy.

Sylvain

[0] https://kerkour.com/what-do-you-want-to-learn-about-web-and-...

[1] https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

The best way I have found to prevent the piracy of my book (https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust) is to inundate pirate platforms with only the first chapter and with a discount inside for those who can't afford the original price.

So far it worked really well.

Black Hat Rust

You mean like this? https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

As usual, you can find the code on GitHub: github.com/skerkour/black-hat-rust (please don't forget to star the repo 🙏).

This post is an excerpt from my book Black Hat Rust

This is why I dedicated the past months to write a book about the topic: Black Hat Rust - Applied offensive security with the Rust programming language.

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lots of questions here regarding what this product is. I guess i can provide some information for the context, from a perspective of an outside contributor.

Chainguard Images is a set of hardened container images.

They were built by the original team that brought you Google's Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)

However, there were few problems with Distroless:

1. distroless were based on Debian - which in turn, limited to Debian's release cadence for fixing CVE.

2. distroless is using bazelbuild, which is not exactly easy to contrib, customize, etc...

3. distroless images are hard to extend.

Chainguard built a new "undistro" OS for container workload, named Wolfi, using their OSS projects like melange (for packaging pkgs) and apko (for building images).

The idea is (from my understanding) is that

1. You don't have to rely on upstream to cut a release. Chainguard will be doing that, with lots of automation & guardrails in placed. This allow them to fix vulnerabilties extremely fast.

> If you have one image based on Ubuntu in your stack, you may as well base them all on Ubuntu, because you only need to download (and store!) the common base image once

This is only true if your infrastructure is static. If your infrastructure is highly elastic, image size has an impact on your time to scale up.

Of course, there are better choices than Alpine to optimize image size. Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless) is a good example.

The same as our code dependencies, container updates can include security patches and bug fixes and improvements. However, they can also include breaking changes and it is crucial you test them thoroughly before putting them into production. Wherever possible, I recommend using the distroless base image which will drastically reduce both your image size, your risk vector, and therefore your maintenance version going forward.

# Use a large Node.js base image to build the application and name it "build" FROM node:18-alpine as build WORKDIR /app # Copy the package.json and package-lock.json files into the working directory before copying the rest of the files # This will cache the dependencies and speed up subsequent builds if the dependencies don't change COPY package*.json /app # You might want to use yarn or pnpm instead RUN npm install COPY . /app RUN npm run build # Instead of using a node:18-alpine image, we are using a distroless image. These are provided by google: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless FROM gcr.io/distroless/nodejs:18 as prod WORKDIR /app # Copy the built application from the "build" image into the "prod" image COPY --from=build /app/.output /app/.output # Since this image only contains node.js, we do not need to specify the node command and simply pass the path to the index.mjs file! CMD ["/app/.output/server/index.mjs"]

Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]

[0]: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md