- Overview
- Requirements
-
Configuration
- Customizing the container scanning settings
- Supported distributions
- Enable Container Scanning through an automatic merge request
- Overriding the container scanning template
- Change scanners
- Setting the default branch image
- Using a custom SSL CA certificate authority
- Vulnerability allowlisting
-
Running container scanning in an offline environment
- Requirements for offline container Scanning
- Make GitLab container scanning analyzer images available inside your Docker registry
- Set container scanning CI/CD variables to use local container scanner analyzers
- Automating container scanning vulnerability database updates with a pipeline
- Scan images in external private registries
- Running the standalone container scanning tool
- Reports JSON format
- Security Dashboard
- Vulnerabilities database
- Interacting with the vulnerabilities
- Solutions for vulnerabilities (auto-remediation)
- Troubleshooting
- Changes
Container Scanning
Introduced in GitLab 10.4.
Your application’s Docker image may itself be based on Docker images that contain known vulnerabilities. By including an extra Container Scanning job in your pipeline that scans for those vulnerabilities and displays them in a merge request, you can use GitLab to audit your Docker-based apps.
Container Scanning is often considered part of Software Composition Analysis (SCA). SCA can contain aspects of inspecting the items your code uses. These items typically include application and system dependencies that are almost always imported from external sources, rather than sourced from items you wrote yourself.
GitLab offers both Container Scanning and Dependency Scanning to ensure coverage for all of these dependency types. To cover as much of your risk area as possible, we encourage you to use all of our security scanners.
Overview
GitLab integrates with open-source tools for vulnerability static analysis in containers:
To integrate GitLab with security scanners other than those listed here, see Security scanner integration.
You can enable container scanning by doing one of the following:
-
Include the CI job in your existing
.gitlab-ci.yml
file. - Implicitly use Auto Container Scanning, provided by Auto DevOps.
GitLab compares the found vulnerabilities between the source and target branches, and shows the information directly in the merge request.
Capabilities
Capability | In Free | In Ultimate |
---|---|---|
Configure Scanners | Yes | Yes |
Customize Settings (Variables, Overriding, offline environment support, etc) | Yes | Yes |
View JSON Report as a CI job artifact | Yes | Yes |
Generation of a JSON report of dependencies as a CI job artifact | Yes | Yes |
Ability to enable container scanning via an MR in the GitLab UI | Yes | Yes |
UBI Image Support | Yes | Yes |
Support for Trivy | Yes | Yes |
Support for Grype | Yes | Yes |
Inclusion of GitLab Advisory Database | Limited to the time-delayed content from GitLab advisories-communities project | Yes - all the latest content from Gemnasium DB |
Presentation of Report data in Merge Request and Security tab of the CI pipeline job | No | Yes |
Interaction with Vulnerabilities such as merge request approvals | No | Yes |
Solutions for vulnerabilities (auto-remediation) | No | Yes |
Support for the vulnerability allow list | No | Yes |
Access to Security Dashboard page | No | Yes |
Access to Dependency List page | No | Yes |
Requirements
To enable container scanning in your pipeline, you need the following:
- Container Scanning runs in the
test
stage, which is available by default. If you redefine the stages in the.gitlab-ci.yml
file, thetest
stage is required. -
GitLab Runner with the
docker
orkubernetes
executor on Linux/amd64. - Docker
18.09.03
or higher installed on the same computer as the runner. If you’re using the shared runners on GitLab.com, then this is already the case. - An image matching the supported distributions.
- Build and push the Docker image to your project’s container registry.
- If you’re using a third-party container registry, you might need to provide authentication
credentials through the
DOCKER_USER
andDOCKER_PASSWORD
configuration variables. For more details on how to use these variables, see authenticate to a remote registry. - GitLab CI/CD pipeline must include the
test
stage, which is available unless overridden with thestages
keyword.
Configuration
To enable container scanning, add the
Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
template
to your .gitlab-ci.yml
file:
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
The included template:
- Creates a
container_scanning
job in your CI/CD pipeline. - Pulls the built Docker image from your project’s container registry (see requirements) and scans it for possible vulnerabilities.
GitLab saves the results as a Container Scanning report artifact that you can download and analyze later. When downloading, you always receive the most-recent artifact. If dependency scan is enabled, a Dependency Scanning report artifact is also created.
The following is a sample .gitlab-ci.yml
that builds your Docker image, pushes it to the container
registry, and scans the image:
include:
- template: Jobs/Build.gitlab-ci.yml
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
container_scanning:
variables:
CS_DEFAULT_BRANCH_IMAGE: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE/$CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
Setting CS_DEFAULT_BRANCH_IMAGE
avoids duplicate vulnerability findings when an image name differs across branches.
The value of CS_DEFAULT_BRANCH_IMAGE
indicates the name of the scanned image as it appears on the default branch.
For more details on how this deduplication is achieved, see Setting the default branch image.
Customizing the container scanning settings
There may be cases where you want to customize how GitLab scans your containers. For example, you
may want to enable more verbose output, access a Docker registry that requires
authentication, and more. To change such settings, use the variables
parameter in your .gitlab-ci.yml
to set CI/CD variables.
The variables you set in your .gitlab-ci.yml
overwrite those in
Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
.
This example includes the container scanning template and enables verbose output for the analyzer:
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
variables:
SECURE_LOG_LEVEL: 'debug'
Scan an image in a remote registry
To scan images located in a registry other than the project’s, use the following .gitlab-ci.yml
:
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
container_scanning:
variables:
DOCKER_IMAGE: example.com/user/image:tag
Authenticate to a remote registry
Scanning an image in a private registry requires authentication. Provide the username in the DOCKER_USER
variable, and the password in the DOCKER_PASSWORD
configuration variable.
For example, to scan an image from AWS Elastic Container Registry:
container_scanning:
before_script:
- ruby -r open-uri -e "IO.copy_stream(URI.open('https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip'), 'awscliv2.zip')"
- unzip awscliv2.zip
- ./aws/install
- aws --version
- export AWS_ECR_PASSWORD=$(aws ecr get-login-password --region region)
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
DOCKER_IMAGE: <aws_account_id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/<image>:<tag>
DOCKER_USER: AWS
DOCKER_PASSWORD: "$AWS_ECR_PASSWORD"
Dependency list
Introduced in GitLab 14.6.
The CS_DISABLE_DEPENDENCY_LIST
CI/CD variable controls whether the scan creates a
Dependency List
report. This variable is currently only supported when the trivy
analyzer is used. The variable’s default setting of "false"
causes the scan to create the report. To disable
the report, set the variable to "true"
:
For example:
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
container_scanning:
variables:
CS_DISABLE_DEPENDENCY_LIST: "true"
Report language-specific findings
Introduced in GitLab 14.6.
The CS_DISABLE_LANGUAGE_VULNERABILITY_SCAN
CI/CD variable controls whether the scan reports
findings related to programming languages. The languages supported depend on the
scanner used:
By default, the report only includes packages managed by the Operating System (OS) package manager
(for example, yum
, apt
, apk
, tdnf
). To report security findings in non-OS packages, set
CS_DISABLE_LANGUAGE_VULNERABILITY_SCAN
to "false"
:
include:
- template: Security/Container-Scanning.gitlab-ci.yml
container_scanning:
variables:
CS_DISABLE_LANGUAGE_VULNERABILITY_SCAN: "false"
When you enable this feature, you may see duplicate findings in the Vulnerability Report if Dependency Scanning is enabled for your project. This happens because GitLab can’t automatically deduplicate findings across different types of scanning tools. Please reference this comparison between GitLab Dependency Scanning and Container Scanning for more details on which types of dependencies are likely to be duplicated.
Available CI/CD variables
You can configure analyzers by using the following CI/CD variables.
CI/CD Variable | Default | Description | Scanner |
---|---|---|---|
ADDITIONAL_CA_CERT_BUNDLE |
"" |
Bundle of CA certs that you want to trust. See Using a custom SSL CA certificate authority for more details. | All |
CI_APPLICATION_REPOSITORY |
$CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE/$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG |
Docker repository URL for the image to be scanned. | All |
CI_APPLICATION_TAG |
$CI_COMMIT_SHA |
Docker repository tag for the image to be scanned. | All |