Skout

With skout, you can get a bird's eye view of the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) detected in the container images running on your Kubernetes cluster, all thanks to Docker Scout.

Note

skout uses Docker Scout which is an early access product at the time of writing.

Recommended requirements

It's highly recommended to have Docker Desktop 4.17 or higher as skout will be using the docker scout CLI plugin that is shipped with that version of Docker Desktop.

However, if Docker Desktop is not present or the version is lower than 4.17, will be using the image docker/scout-cli to analyze the images running in the Kubernetes cluster. Note that the analysis will take longer as we'll be running docker scout in a container instead of using the CLI that comes with Docker Desktop 4.17 or higher. If that's the case, make sure to provide DOCKER_SCOUT_HUB_USER and DOCKER_SCOUT_HUB_PASSWORD as environment variables to provide such values within the container where docker scout runs.

Getting started

If you don't have a Kubernetes cluster, you can enable the one that comes with Docker Desktop or create quickly one with KinD: kind create cluster.

Go to the releases page and download the skout binary for your platform, for instance:

curl -LsO https://github.com/felipecruz91/skout/releases/download/0.0.3/skout_0.0.3_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvzf skout_0.0.3_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv skout /usr/local/bin/skout

Detect vulnerabilities across all the namespaces

skout 

Detect vulnerabilities in the default namespace

skout --namespace default

Passing options to the analysis

You can specify in skout the options defined in docker scout cves -h to customize the report, for instance:

skout --namespace default --ignore-base --only-fixed

How does it work?

skout is a CLI built in Go that connects to a Kubernetes cluster by using a kubeconfig file (default ~/.kube/config). Use the -kubeconfig flag to specify a different location of the kubeconfig file if required.

It uses the Kubernetes Go SDK to retrieve the list of container images that are running in the cluster (or in a given namespace if -namespace is set). Then, it runs docker scout on every image to find out the number of vulnerabilities (critical, high, medium and low). Finally, skout displays the vulnerability information in a table format for easy viewing and analysis.

Why could this be useful?

Ideally, you would do image vulnerability scanning as part of your CI/CD pipeline to prevent container images being deployed to your Kubernetes cluster according to a customizable threshold. An image may have 0 CVEs when it's first deployed to your cluster, however, new CVEs can surface over time and long-lived workloads that are not updated/patched regularly will become vulnerable eventually.

With skout you can get a feel of how good or bad your Kubernetes cluster's workloads perform in terms of number of CVEs at runtime. This can help users identify any security issues in their Kubernetes cluster, such as what images have the most vulnerabilities, and take appropriate actions to mitigate them with docker scout eventually.