dependency-track VS apko

I've become interested in SBOM recently, and found there were great tools like https://dependencytrack.org/ for CycloneDX SBOMs, but all I have is SPDX SBOMs generated by GitHub.

I decided to have a go at writing my own dependency track esque tool aiming to integrate with the APIs GitHub provides.

It's pretty limited in functionality so far, but can give a high level summary of the types of licenses your repository dependencies use, and let you drill down into potentially problematic ones.

Written in NextJS + mui + sqlite, and using another project of mine to generate most of the API boilerplate/glue (https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator)

To detect these types of vulnerabilities, we should first and foremost know our dependencies and versions, and which of them have vulnerabilities. The OWASP Top 10 2021 identifies this need as A06:2021-Vulnerable and Outdated Components. OWASP has several tools for this, including Dependency Check and Dependency Track. These tools will warn about the use of components with vulnerabilities.

https://dependencytrack.org/

You just need to use one of the various tools out there to scan.

OWASP Dependency Track - https://dependencytrack.org/

Dependency-Track

I actually want to build the same thing you are after, and I think I’ll go for the setup you describe in idea 2. The tool you can use for this is Trivy (https://trivy.dev), have it generate a SBOM and send it to Dependencytrack (https://dependencytrack.org).

If you like Dependency-Track, consider moving to Dependency-Track ( https://dependencytrack.org ), which makes administration much easier.

Even if you roll up the sleeves and add the feature yourself there is no guarantee it will be accepted upstream and you should always be prepared for the possibility of wasting time.

I don't quite understand the deployment issue. I mean, I understand people might not be tracking what's deployed, but I don't understand what is missing for it to be happening today, other than will.

For example: I build some software into a Docker image, version tag it, sign it, and generate an SBOM for it. That image goes into production with signature validation. Even if I've included 100 jar files in there, I should know exactly which ones I have. I can upload the SBOM to my DependencyTrack[1] instance to so over time no dependencies have vulnerabilities I'm not aware of.

What doesn't work in that scenario? What scenarios can't conform to that one?

[1] https://dependencytrack.org

apko allows us to build OCI container images from .apk packages.

We have built something very similar to what you are describing: https://github.com/chainguard-dev/apko

apko

Chainguard also appears to have several open source projects.The most popular one is apko, used for building OCI images from APK packages.

Once those are done, I just need to build aws-cli package, put those APK files in a final image with Chainguard's apko.

This is one of my absolute favorite topics. Pardon me while I rant and self-promote :D

Dockerfiles are great for flexibility, and have been a critical contributor to the adoption of Docker containers. It's very easy to take a base image, add a thing to it, and publish your version.

Unfortunately Dockerfiles are also full of gotchas and opaque cargo-culted best practices to avoid them. Being an open-ended execution environment, it's basically impossible to tell even during the build what's being added to the image, which has downstream implications for anybody trying to get an SBOM from the image for example.

Instead, I contribute to a number of tools to build and manage images without Dockerfiles. Each of them are less featureful than Dockerfiles, but being more constrained in what they can do, you can get a lot more visibility into what they're doing, since they're not able to do "whatever the user wants".

1. https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry is a Go module to interact with images in the registry and in tarballs and layouts, in the local docker daemon. You can append layers, squash layers, modify metadata, etc.

2. crane is a CLI that uses the above (in the same repo) to make many of the same modifications from the commandline. `crane append` for instance adds a layer containing some contents to an image, entirely in the registry, without even pulling the base image.

3. ko (https://ko.build) is a tool to build Go applications into images without Dockerfiles or Docker at all. It runs `go build`, appends that binary on top of a base image, and pushes it directly to the registry. It generates an SBOM declaring what Go modules went into the app it put into the image, since that's all it can do.

4. apko (https://apko.dev) is a tool to assemble an image from pre-built apks, without Docker. It's capable of producing "distroless" images easily with config in YAML. It generates an SBOM declaring exactly what apks it put in the image, since that's all it can do.

Bazel's rules_docker is another contender in the space, and GCP's distroless images use it to place Debian .debs into an image. Apko is its spiritual successor, and uses YAML instead of Bazel's own config language, which makes it a lot easier to adopt and use (IMO), with all of the same benefits.

I'm excited to see more folks realizing that Dockerfiles aren't always necessary, and can sometimes make your life harder. I'm extra excited to see more tools and tutorials digging into the details of how container images work, and preaching the gospel that they can be built and modified using existing tooling and relatively simple libraries. Excellent article!

Depends exactly what you're trying to create it for. I advocate for doing it during the build process rather than as a step after.

We open sourced a few tools that do it automatically for containers:

https://github.com/chainguard-dev/apko

https://github.com/chainguard-dev/melange

apko takes apk packages and builds them into OCI images (aka Docker images). Sounds quite simple, because it is: