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Scanning pods for vulnerabilities

Using the Container Security Operator (CSO), you can access vulnerability scan results from the OpenShift Container Platform web console for container images used in active pods on the cluster. The CSO:

  • Watches containers associated with pods on all or specified namespaces

  • Queries the container registry where the containers came from for vulnerability information, provided an image’s registry is running image scanning (such as Quay.io or a Red Hat Quay registry with Clair scanning)

  • Exposes vulnerabilities via the ImageManifestVuln object in the Kubernetes API

Using the instructions here, the CSO is installed in the openshift-operators namespace, so it is available to all namespaces on your OpenShift cluster.

Running the Container Security Operator

You can start the Container Security Operator from the OpenShift Container Platform web console by selecting and installing that Operator from the Operator Hub, as described here.

Prerequisites

  • Have administrator privileges to the OpenShift Container Platform cluster

  • Have containers that come from a Red Hat Quay or Quay.io registry running on your cluster

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Operators → OperatorHub and select Security.

  2. Select the Container Security Operator, then select Install to go to the Create Operator Subscription page.

  3. Check the settings. All namespaces and automatic approval strategy are selected, by default.

  4. Select Install. The Container Security Operator appears after a few moments on the Installed Operators screen.

  5. Optionally, you can add custom certificates to the CSO. In this example, create a certificate named quay.crt in the current directory. Then run the following command to add the cert to the CSO:

    $ oc create secret generic container-security-operator-extra-certs --from-file=quay.crt -n openshift-operators

  6. If you added a custom certificate, restart the Operator pod for the new certs to take effect.

  7. Open the OpenShift Dashboard (Home → Overview). A link to Quay Image Security appears under the status section, with a listing of the number of vulnerabilities found so far. Select the link to see a Quay Image Security breakdown, as shown in the following figure:

    Access image scanning data from OpenShift Container Platform dashboard

  8. You can do one of two things at this point to follow up on any detected vulnerabilities:

    • Select the link to the vulnerability. You are taken to the container registry that the container came from, where you can see information about the vulnerability. The following figure shows an example of detected vulnerabilities from a Quay.io registry:

      The CSO points you to a registry containing the vulnerable image

    • Select the namespaces link to go to the ImageManifestVuln screen, where you can see the name of the selected image and all namespaces where that image is running. The following figure indicates that a particular vulnerable image is running in the quay-enterprise namespace:

      View namespaces a vulnerable image is running in

At this point, you know what images are vulnerable, what you need to do to fix those vulnerabilities, and every namespace that the image was run in. So you can:

  • Alert anyone running the image that they need to correct the vulnerability

  • Stop the images from running by deleting the deployment or other object that started the pod that the image is in

Note that if you do delete the pod, it may take several minutes for the vulnerability to reset on the dashboard.

Querying image vulnerabilities from the CLI

Using the oc command, you can display information about vulnerabilities detected by the Container Security Operator.

Prerequisites

  • Be running the Container Security Operator on your OpenShift Container Platform instance

Procedure

  • To query for detected container image vulnerabilities, type:

    $ oc get vuln --all-namespaces
    Example output
    NAMESPACE     NAME              AGE
default       sha256.ca90...    6m56s
skynet        sha256.ca90...    9m37s

  • To display details for a particular vulnerability, provide the vulnerability name and its namespace to the oc describe command. This example shows an active container whose image includes an RPM package with a vulnerability:

    $ oc describe vuln --namespace mynamespace sha256.ac50e3752...
    Example output
    Name:         sha256.ac50e3752...
Namespace:    quay-enterprise
...
Spec:
  Features:
    Name:            nss-util
    Namespace Name:  centos:7
    Version:         3.44.0-3.el7
    Versionformat:   rpm
    Vulnerabilities:
      Description: Network Security Services (NSS) is a set of libraries...