Clair

Clair is an open-source project for the static analysis of vulnerabilities in application containers (currently including appc and docker).

1. In regular intervals, Clair ingests vulnerability metadata from a configured set of sources and stores it in the database.
2. Clients use the Clair API to index their container images; this creates a list of features present in the image and stores them in the database.
3. Clients use the Clair API to query the database for vulnerabilities of a particular image; correlating vulnerabilities and features is done for each request, avoiding the need to rescan images.
4. When updates to vulnerability metadata occur, a notification can be sent to alert systems that a change has occurred.

Our goal is to enable a more transparent view of the security of the container-based infrastructure. Thus, the project was named Clair after the French term which translates to clear, bright, transparent.

Terminology

Container

• Container – the execution of an image
• Image – a set of tarballs that contain the filesystem contents and run-time metadata of a container
• Layer – one of the tarballs used in the composition of an image, often expressed as a filesystem delta from another layer

Specific to Clair

• Ancestry – the Clair-internal representation of an Image
• Feature – anything that when present in a filesystem could be an indication of a vulnerability (e.g. the presence of a file or an installed software package)
• Feature Namespace (featurens) – a context around features and vulnerabilities (e.g. an operating system or a programming language)
• Vulnerability Source (vulnsrc) – the component of Clair that tracks upstream vulnerability data and imports them into Clair’s database
• Vulnerability Metadata Source (vulnmdsrc) – the component of Clair that tracks upstream vulnerability metadata and associates them with vulnerabilities in Clair’s database

Install && Use

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