• Overview
  • Capabilities
• Requirements
• Configuration
  • Customizing the container scanning settings
    • Scan an image in a remote registry
      • Authenticate to a remote registry
    • Dependency list
    • Report language-specific findings
    • Available CI/CD variables
  • Supported distributions
    • FIPS-enabled images
  • 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
    • vulnerability-allowlist.yml data format
      • File format
      • Container scanning job log format
  • Running container scanning in an offline environment
    • Requirements for offline container Scanning
      • Support for Custom Certificate Authorities
    • 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
  • docker: Error response from daemon: failed to copy xattrs
  • Getting warning message gl-container-scanning-report.json: no matching files
• Changes

Container Scanning

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:

• Trivy
• Grype

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

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, the test stage is required.
• GitLab Runner with the docker or kubernetes 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 and DOCKER_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 the stages 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

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

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:

• Trivy.
• Grype.

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.