On The Relation Between Outdated Docker Containers, Severity Vulnerabilities and Bugs
This research addresses container security for cloud deployers by highlighting persistent vulnerabilities, though it is incremental in analyzing existing data.
The study analyzed 7,380 Docker images based on Debian to examine how outdated containers relate to vulnerabilities and bugs, finding that no release is completely free of vulnerabilities, even with the most recent packages.
Packaging software into containers is becoming a common practice when deploying services in cloud and other environments. Docker images are one of the most popular container technologies for building and deploying containers. A container image usually includes a collection of software packages, that can have bugs and security vulnerabilities that affect the container health. Our goal is to support container deployers by analysing the relation between outdated containers and vulnerable and buggy packages installed in them. We use the concept of technical lag of a container as the difference between a given container and the most up-to-date container that is possible with the most recent releases of the same collection of packages. For 7,380 official and community Docker images that are based on the Debian Linux distribution, we identify which software packages are installed in them and measure their technical lag in terms of version updates, security vulnerabilities and bugs. We have found, among others, that no release is devoid of vulnerabilities, so deployers cannot avoid vulnerabilities even if they deploy the most recent packages. We offer some lessons learned for container developers in regard to the strategies they can follow to minimize the number of vulnerabilities. We argue that Docker container scan and security management tools should improve their platforms by adding data about other kinds of bugs and include the measurement of technical lag to offer deployers information of when to update.