The most popular docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities
Although vulnerability scanners can be a useful tool, I find it very troublesome that you can utter the sentence &quot;this package contains XX vulnerabilities, and that package contains YY vulnerabilities&quot; <i>and then stop talking</i>. You&#x27;ve provided barely any useful information!<p>The quantity of vulnerabilities in an image is not really all that useful information. A large amount of vulnerabilities in a Docker image does not necessarily imply that there&#x27;s anything insecure going on. Many people don&#x27;t realize that a vulnerability is usually defined as &quot;has a CVE security advisory&quot;, and that CVEs get assigned based on a worst-case evaluation of the bug. As a result, having a CVE in your container barely tells you anything about your actual vulnerability position. In fact, most of the time you will find that having a CVE in some random utility doesn&#x27;t matter. Most CVEs in system packages don&#x27;t apply to most of your containers&#x27; threat models.<p>Why not? Because an attacker is very unlikely to be able to use vulnerabilities in these system libraries or utilities. Those utilities are usually not in active use in the first place. Even if they are used, you are not usually in a position to exploit these vulnerabilities as an attacker.<p>Just as an example, a hypothetical outdated version of grep in one of these containers can hypothetically contain many CVEs. But if your Docker service doesn&#x27;t use grep, then you would need to <i>manually run</i> grep to be vulnerable. And an attacker that is able to run grep in your Docker container has <i>already owned you</i> - it doesn&#x27;t make a difference that your grep is vulnerable! This hypothetical vulnerable version of grep therefore makes no difference in the security of your container, despite containing many CVEs.<p>It&#x27;s the <i>quality</i> of these vulnerabilities that matters. Can an attacker actually exploit the vulnerabilities to do bad things? The answer for almost all of these CVEs is &quot;no&quot;. But that&#x27;s not really the product that Snyk sells - Snyk sells a product to show you as many vulnerabilities as possible. Any vulnerability scanner company thinks it can provide most business value (and make the most money) by reporting as many vulnerabilities as it can. For sure it can help you to pinpoint those few vulnerabilities that are exploitable, but that&#x27;s where your own analysis comes in.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there&#x27;s not a lot to improve in terms of container security. There&#x27;s a <i>whole bunch</i> to improve there. But focusing on quantities like &quot;amount of CVEs in an image&quot; is not the solution - it&#x27;s marketing.