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Nicolas Frankel
Nicolas Frankel

Posted on • Originally published at blog.frankel.ch

Kicking the tires of Docker Scout

I never moved away from Docker Desktop. For some time, after you use it to build an image, it prints a message:

What's Next?
  View a summary of image vulnerabilities and recommendations → docker scout quickview
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I decided to give it a try. I'll use the root commit of my OpenTelemetry tracing demo. Let's execute the proposed command:

docker scout quickview otel-catalog:1.0
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Here's the result:

    ✓ Image stored for indexing
    ✓ Indexed 272 packages
  Target               │  otel-catalog:1.0        │    0C     2H    15M    23L
    digest             │  7adfce68062e            │
  Base image           │  eclipse-temurin:21-jre  │    0C     0H    15M    23L
  Refreshed base image │  eclipse-temurin:21-jre  │    0C     0H    15M    23L
                       │                          │
What's Next?
  View vulnerabilities → docker scout cves otel-catalog:1.0
  View base image update recommendations → docker scout recommendations otel-catalog:1.0
  Include policy results in your quickview by supplying an organization → docker scout quickview otel-catalog:1.0 --org <organization>
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Docker gives out exciting bits of information:

  • The base image contains 15 middle-severity vulnerabilities and 23 low-severity ones
  • The final image has an additional two high-level severity
  • Ergo, our code introduced them!

Following Scout's suggestion, we can drill down the CVEs:

docker scout cves otel-catalog:1.0
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This is the result:

    ✓ SBOM of image already cached, 272 packages indexed
    ✗ Detected 18 vulnerable packages with a total of 39 vulnerabilities
## Overview
                    │       Analyzed Image
────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────
  Target            │  otel-catalog:1.0
    digest          │  7adfce68062e
    platform        │ linux/arm64
    vulnerabilities │    0C     2H    15M    23L
    size            │ 160 MB
    packages        │ 272
## Packages and Vulnerabilities
   0C     1H     0M     0L  org.yaml/snakeyaml 1.33
pkg:maven/org.yaml/snakeyaml@1.33
    ✗ HIGH CVE-2022-1471 [Improper Input Validation]
      https://scout.docker.com/v/CVE-2022-1471
      Affected range : <=1.33
      Fixed version  : 2.0
      CVSS Score     : 8.3
      CVSS Vector    : CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:L
   0C     1H     0M     0L  io.netty/netty-handler 4.1.100.Final
pkg:maven/io.netty/netty-handler@4.1.100.Final
    ✗ HIGH CVE-2023-4586 [OWASP Top Ten 2017 Category A9 - Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities]
      https://scout.docker.com/v/CVE-2023-4586
      Affected range : >=4.1.0
                     : <5.0.0
      Fixed version  : not fixed
      CVSS Score     : 7.4
      CVSS Vector    : CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
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The original output is much longer, but I stopped at the exciting bit: the two high-severity CVEs, First, we see the one coming from Netty still needs to be fixed - tough luck. However, Snake YAML fixed its CVE from version 2.0 onward.

I'm not using Snake YAML directly; it's a Spring dependency brought by Spring. Because of this, no guarantee exists that a major version upgrade will be compatible. But we can surely try. Let's bump the dependency to the latest version:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.yaml</groupId>
    <artifactId>snakeyaml</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
</dependency>
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We can build the image again and check that it still works. Fortunately, it does. We can execute the process again:

docker scout quickview otel-catalog:1.0
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Lo and behold, the high-severity CVE is no more!

    ✓ Image stored for indexing
    ✓ Indexed 273 packages
  Target     │  local://otel-catalog:1.0-1  │    0C     1H    15M    23L
    digest   │  9ddc31cdd304                │
  Base image │  eclipse-temurin:21-jre      │    0C     0H    15M    23L
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Conclusion

In this short post, we tried Docker Scout, the Docker image vulnerability detection tool. Thanks to it, we removed one high-level CVE we introduced in the code.

To go further:

Originally published at A Java Geek on January 14th, 2024

Top comments (3)

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ecki profile image
Bernd

The ui also shows the info.
Btw did you find a way to get rid of the regular appearing upgrade warnings?

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nfrankel profile image
Nicolas Frankel

I didn't find a way to get rid of the upgade warnings. I think the free version, which I'm using, forces you to upgrade anyway.

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ecki profile image
Bernd

The only easy way seems to be docker desktop updates until the embedded scout is again outdated. If that’s the default way docker should just disable the warnings. I might open a support ticket for it.