ncc VS trivy

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

You could use ncc to compile a binary:

https://github.com/vercel/ncc

This appears to be caused by lazy loading of image layer data, particularly during container initialization, and latency introduced by the read operations. In general, you want to access as few files and as little data as possible during the initialization of your functions. For example, we've seen improvement when using ncc to bundle Node.js applications.

What we do however, is bundle all these dependencies, and our own code into a single JS file using the nifty ncc tool (thanks Vercel!)

Vercel's ncc compiler

The most unclear and confusing part is packing the code using ncc. The necessity of this step is caused by GitHub’s approach to running your Action.

I filed an issue for the ncc bundler regarding a similar behavior

This may be slightly tangential but I recently discovered ncc[1] from vercel which can take a single node project and compile it and all dependencies to a single file.

As an added benefit it also collapses all contained dependencies license files into a single licenses.txt file too!

- [1] https://github.com/vercel/ncc

The current process of building a package locally is by running through a gulp task, using ttypescript to compile the TS and @vercel/ncc to build the binary:

Trivy Owner/Maintainer: Aqua Security Age: First released on GitHub on May 7th, 2019 License: Apache License 2.0 backward-compatible with tfsec

Trivy. A Simple and Comprehensive Vulnerability Scanner for Containers.

Using Trivy:

Trivy is a mature and comprehensive open source tool from Aqua Security that supports scanning multiple sources, from file systems to containers and VMs. Trivy also looks beyond vulnerabilities, to scan licenses, secrets, infrastructure as code misconfiguration, and more.

I would suggest to think about the thread model that you are facing so you can have a better mental model of the weak points of your environment. The very very big majority of these attacks will be automated probing for publicly known vulnerabilities or default credentials. That means the maintainers of the software you are running and the channels on which their updates are shipped to you and deployed are very important factors. For software that is not installed from a trusted and well maintained source (e.g. Ubuntus main repository), you want to make extra sure that vulnerabilities are updated. E.g. your deployed docker containers might contain security issues, you can run checks on these with tools like trivy. The same is also true for appliances, in case your router or firewall contains a software vulnerability, how will you be notified and how will the required updates be deployed?