How Snyk Container works
Container images comprise a layered file system and associated metadata, as defined by the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specifications.
Container images often include several layers containing third-party software from:
- Operating system distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS.
- Application package managers, such as npm, pip and RubyGems.
When Snyk Container scans an image, using any of the available integrations, we first find the software installed in the image, including:
- dpkg, rpm and apk operating systems packages.
- Popular unmanaged software, ie. installed outside a package manager.
- Application packages are i.e.based on the presence of a manifest file.
Note: the container does not need to be run as Snyk reads the info from the file system; therefore, no container or foreign code needs to be run to scan successfully.
After we have the list of installed software, we look that up against our vulnerability database, which combines public sources with proprietary research.
We detect vulnerabilities in images based on the following:
- Alpine Linux
- Amazon Linux
- CentOS Linux & CentOS Stream
- Debian
- Oracle Linux
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including Universal Base Image (UBI)
- Rocky Linux
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
- Ubuntu
Check out the Operating Systems Support page for specific version support and our updates page for all the latest updates.
Note: Snyk also supports images using packages from those distributions but without the associated package manager, such as Distroless images.
Some software components from upstream providers are not installed using a package manager, but are downloaded as executables from third-parties. Snyk uses file fingerprinting to detect versions of the following components:
- Node.js
- OpenJDK
New vulnerabilities are disclosed continuously. Snyk can alert you to new vulnerabilities in your image as they are announced, even when your image software installed has not changed.
If you use an integration which saves a snapshot of the installed software on Snyk’s service, and the image has not changed, Snyk Container automatically rescans without accessing the image, alerting you to new vulnerabilities quicker. However, if the image has changed then Snyk will access the image and pull it before rescanning it.
Note that recurring scans do not detect updates to the dependencies of your applications. The recurring scans simply test for new vulnerabilities using a snapshot of your application dependencies at the time the application was imported.
To detect changes in your application, such as updated dependencies, re-import your container image in Snyk. See Getting started with Snyk Container for an example on how to import your image.