Vulnerability Management

About Vulnerability Management

Sysdig Secure Vulnerabilities module addresses the top requirements for effective vulnerability management:

• Provides highly accurate views of vulnerability risk at scale
• Rich details provide precision about vulnerability risk, such as CVSS vector, score, and fix age, and insights from multiple expert feeds, such as VulnDB
• Access to public exploits allows you to verify security controls and patch efficiently
• Prioritized risk data focused on the vulnerabilities that are tied to the packages loaded at runtime
• Accepting risks when the vulnerability matching does not apply for your particular deployment, or you want to postpone remediation

Note: At this time, the Vulnerability Management engine supports: CI/CD pipeline and runtime image scanning, policies, notifications, and reporting for runtime. Registry scanning does not yet support policies.

Understand Vulnerability Management Stages

To create an effective vulnerability management plan, it’s important to recognize the various stages of the lifecycle that need to be addressed.

Key Concepts

• During the build phase, software vulnerabilities may be introduced when container images are defined and assembled. Container images are, by definition, immutable. Altering the contents of an image will update the ImageID and, thus, will be considered a different image by Sysdig Secure.

• Even though unique container images (ImageIDs) cannot be modified, Sysdig can identify new vulnerabilities in running containers (for example, in Kubernetes workloads) as security feeds are continuously updated. For instance, a container image with no known vulnerabilities during its build phase might be affected by a critical vulnerability discovered ten days after being deployed into the runtime. The image remains unchanged, but new security information related to the software it contains has been found.

• Sysdig uses the same fundamental concepts to analyze the contents of an image (SBOM) and match vulnerabilities but treats images differently based on their location. Sysdig can analyze the vulnerabilities of images in a development pipeline, stored in a container image registry, or used as the template for a running container, known as runtime workloads.

Stages: Pipeline - Registry - Runtime

Pipeline

Any analysis conducted before the registry phase is considered a pipeline. A clear example is CI/CD builds (Jenkins, Github, etc.), but also the execution of the sysdig-cli-scanner binary performed on a developer laptop or using a custom scanning script.

• Pipeline images do not have runtime context.
• The scan happens outside of the execution nodes where the agent is installed:
  • CI/CD
  • External instrumentation
  • Custom scripts or image scanning plugins
• Pipeline scans are one-off vulnerability reports; the information is a static snapshot with its corresponding execution date.
  • If you want to evaluate a newer version of the image or reevaluate the same image with newer feed information, the analysis needs to be triggered again.
• Images analyzed using the sysdig-cli-scanner will show up in the Pipeline section of the vulnerability management interface.

Registry

Container Registry scanning allows you to integrate Sysdig with image registries from a range of vendors. Registry scanning provides an extra layer of defense between pipeline and runtime, where:

• Software that sits in the registry before being deployed is checked for newly discovered vulnerabilities
• Third-party software that may have been installed without going through pipeline scanning will be checked

Registry scans occur as scheduled through a cron job in the installation Helm chart once per week (Saturdays at 6:00 AM) by default.

• Batch scanning is done asynchronously and separately from the development pipeline; regardless of the time it takes to scan the batch, the pipeline is unaffected.

See Install Registry scanner(s).

Runtime

Runtime workloads are executed using a container image. Accessing the Runtime section of the Vulnerabilities menu, you will be able to see those images and their vulnerability and policy evaluation.

• Runtime workloads are located in an execution node and are being monitored by a Sysdig agent/node analyzer, for example a Kubernetes node that is instrumented using the Sysdig agent bundle.
• Runtime workloads will offer a live, auto-refreshing state. This means:
  • Workloads that are no longer running will be removed from the runtime view
  • Vulnerabilities and policies evaluations will automatically refresh without any user interaction, offering always the most up-to-date information known.
    • At least once per day
• Runtime workload have a runtime context associated with them, i.e. Kubernetes cluster and namespace.
• Workloads analyzed during runtime will show up in the Runtime section of the vulnerability management interface.

See Runtime.

Asset Types: Workload, Host, and Container

The way things are scanned and how results are filtered relies on how Sysdig defines and uses the concepts of “image,” “workload,” “host,” and “container.”

Image

Image is not officially an asset type, but is the primary unit underlying all types of scanning.

• In Pipeline and Registry scanning, Sysdig scans images used in container-based environments.

• In Runtime, images have the context of either Kubernetes or the container host environment.

These images are strictly evaluated based on the image definition without reference to the deployed context (neither runtime nor orchestrator).

All images are extracted into a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) format that is compatible with the CycloneDX standard. See CycloneDX for details.

Workload

When scanning images that are deployed in Kubernetes environments, the scanner evaluates the image in the context of the container running in a Kubernetes workload. This context makes it contextually different from images and containers.

Host

A host is a full-stack Operating System (OS) running on virtual infrastructure such as Cloud IaaS or Virtual Machines. The host will also have an SBOM, without the layers that are seen in images. All the context data for a host is relative to a full-stack OS with network connectivity (OS, Host Name, IPs, etc.).

Container

When Sysdig scans a container (either agentlessly or with the agent) it extracts a container from a Host image via the filesystem. In container scans, only the parent host context is available, not the runtime and orchestration context.

To be scanned by Sysdig, containers must all be compliant with the Open Container Initiative (OCI). See OCI for details.

Usage

When defining a Vulnerability policy or filtering Runtime vulnerability results, you can define the asset type to use.