Minimal Base Images for Security: A Practical Guide
Minimal base images cut CVE counts by up to 95% by shipping only what your app needs. Here is how to choose between distroless, Wolfi, Alpine, and scratch — and build on each safely.
Deep dives, practical guides, and incident analyses from engineers who build Safeguard. No fluff, no vendor FUD — just what you need to ship secure software.
Minimal base images cut CVE counts by up to 95% by shipping only what your app needs. Here is how to choose between distroless, Wolfi, Alpine, and scratch — and build on each safely.
Docker grants every container 14 Linux capabilities by default. Here's why NET_RAW, SYS_CHROOT, and friends turn contained compromises into breakouts—and how to drop them safely.
Docker's --privileged flag strips seccomp, AppArmor, and capability limits in one line. Here's how attackers exploit it, real CVEs, and how to lock it down.
Alpine is tiny and dodged the xz backdoor; Debian has deeper security tracking and broader compatibility. Here is how the two base images actually compare on security — and how to harden either one.
A container is a process with boundaries, not a virtual machine. When those boundaries fail, an attacker lands on the host. Here is the anatomy of real container escapes — runc, Leaky Vessels, Dirty Pipe — and how to defend against them.
Alpine is tiny and familiar; distroless is tinier and shell-free. The right choice depends on what you value more — debuggability or a minimal attack surface. Here is the honest tradeoff.
Scanning a container after it deploys is an incident report. Scanning it in the pipeline is a one-line diff. Here is how to gate builds on image scans without drowning developers in false positives.
Your registry is the single point every image passes through — and a favorite target for attackers who want to poison many deployments at once. Here is how to lock it down end to end.
The API server is the front door to your cluster — every kubectl command, controller, and kubelet talks to it. If it is misconfigured, nothing else you harden matters. Here is how to lock it down.
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