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Show HN: Minimal – Open-Source Community driven Hardened Container Images

75 pointsby ritvikarya98yesterday at 7:58 PM24 commentsview on HN

I would like to share Minimal - Its a open source collection of hardened container images build using Apko, Melange and Wolfi packages. The images are build daily, checked for updates and resolved as soon as fix is available in upstream source and Wolfi package. It utilizes the power of available open source solutions and contains commercially available images for free. Minimal demonstrates that it is possible to build and maintain hardened container images by ourselves. Minimal will add more images support, and goal is to be community driven to add images as required and fully customizable.


Comments

lmeyerovtoday at 1:14 AM

I have been curious on secure base images for the AI ecosystem, where we need to ship with cuda 11.8/12.8/13.1 for stability reasons, and in our case, a bit of the torch ecosystem and Nvidia rapids ecosystem. That ends up being... A lot. Extra fun: going all the way to FIPS..

0xcryptotoday at 4:15 AM

Fewer CVEs do not necessarily mean safety.

debarshriyesterday at 8:46 PM

This is great. I have been talking to quite some vendors in the space. I have looked in docker hardened images too. They have made it free too.

I think the problem in general is hardened image market is keeping up with CVEs and making sure the catalog is vast so that it covers all the images and nuances.

Responding and patchibg CVEs with an SLA is the KPI of the vendors. As much as I would like cheer for you, doing it as an opensource initiate with a guaranteed SLA is going to be painful for you as maintainer without profit as a motive.

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euph0riatoday at 1:20 AM

What is the process to trust the usage of this?

How can we learn the identity of the contributors? How are the contributors vetted? How are we notified if a significant change in leadership happens?

It's just a general problem when relying on GitHub accounts for important code.

For some reason I trust the big vendors to have better safe-guards against things like the questions above. Such as aws linux containers etc..

Would love to hear how other people think around this.

dgrovetoday at 1:11 AM

I'm not sure what problem this is solving. This seems like chainguard but being built in "your ci" (github) vs "their ci". Images may be a bit smaller, but this is already a feature set that wolfi already allows for. Besides that chainguard is not full-source bootstrapped.

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adriandyesterday at 9:42 PM

Dumb question but how would these work in practice? I use kamal to deploy containerized applications. Would I on a regular basis update the versions of the underlying images to match the latest hardened container and then redeploy? I assume this is automatable?

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Dayshineyesterday at 10:43 PM

Why does this not use chisel? I assume you at least drop the bin dir? Although the presence of ncurses is super weird

I don't understand why one would go halfway and leave packages which are unneeded for services. The only executable in a hardened container image should be your application.

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anukritisinghyesterday at 9:06 PM

Looks very useful, we should definitely build up on this!!!

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humayuuunyesterday at 9:52 PM

Need more information on how I can integrate this in my pipeline but this looks promising