documentation VS grype

Both Kata Containers and UTM support virtio-fs, so this is not strictly true. The former can be used as a stand-in replacement for the runtime used by docker desktop[1]. With the latter, one could use a UTM-backed guest as a docker runtime in macOS[2] or run docker directly on the guest[3].

[1] https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master...

[2] https://www.codeluge.com/post/setting-up-docker-on-macos-m1-...

[3] https://www.lifeintech.com/2021/11/03/docker-performance-on-...

For services with increased security requirements, it is recommended to use a low-level run-time with a high degree of isolation (gVisior, Kata-runtime)

On the official Kata repo, I found a tutorial only for manually deployed Kubernetes on GCE.

This is new and may not be used much, but it is possible to use part of Kata with part of Firecracker. https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/wiki/Initia...

If it's using firecracker, it's probably using KVM virtualization while ensuring that the memory the VM consumes is not pinned... that is, that the VM can be swapped out of memory. For reference, firecracker was created by AWS to run and secure AWS Lambda. The hypervisor is written in rust and uses seccomp to eliminate unnecessary system calls. They open sourced it a few years back.

What you gain is a stronger security boundary. Just FYI, since 2019, you can also do this in Kubernetes using Kata containers which will happily shim firecracker. The setup is not simple though.

https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/wiki/Initia...

Overall, fly.io building infrastructure on this pattern is fantastic and making it accessible is fantastic. Looking forward to seeing how this continues to evolve and am happy to see more infra build on top of firecracker. Very exciting!

Besides pointing pentester tools like metasploit at yourself, there are some nice scanners out there.

https://github.com/quay/clair

https://github.com/anchore/grype/

Using Grype:

In the lab to follow, we'll see how vulnerability scanning can be conveniently achieved with Grype and how various systematic techniques can be applied to start securing our microservices at the container image level.

Scanning your container images for vulnerabilities is a good approach. But this scanning is not one time job, it should be done regularly (weekly, monthly, etc.) You need to follow vulnerability reports and fix all of the vulnerabilities as soon as possible. I recommend some open-source tools that could be useful: Trivy, Docker-Bench, Grype.

Grype is another popular open source tool from Anchore. Working with SBOM files, Grype scans container images and filesystems for vulnerabilities. Grype supports different output formats for vulnerabilities and custom templates for output.

Grype (https://github.com/anchore/grype)

Grype will allow you to scan a container to see if you have any vulnerable packages.

https://github.com/anchore/grype 5.6k stars, updated 3 days ago

I have a Docker image that I built with python:3.10-slim. I wanted to start scanning my images so I'm using grype to do it locally with the plan to introduce it to a GitHub Actions workflow. After I ran the scanner, there was one critical issue found: libdb5.3 CVE-2019-8457. I looked it up and it seems to be an issue with sqlite.