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Sign UpMinimal, FIPS-validated image useful as a base for building secure images.
Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.
This image is available on cgr.dev
:
Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION
placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard registry.
chainguard-base-fips
is the FIPS version of our chainguard-base
image. Like the regular chainguard-base
image, it is comparable to other common base images, like alpine
, debian
, or ubuntu
, with the following differences:
chainguard-base-fips
features a stripped down, minimal designMost importantly, the chainguard-base-fips
image contains the OpenSSL FIPS Provider Module (CMVP #4282).
FIPS (short for Federal Information Processing Standards) are standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and approved by the Secretary of Commerce. FIPS compliance ensures that cryptographic security services within applications meet strict security and integrity standards, and are implemented and configured correctly.
Chainguard offers a variety of language-specific FIPS Images configured out of the box for FIPS development in a given language. We also offer a number base FIPS images for specific applications, such as PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and nginx.
Be aware that if you run apk add
to install a package onto a Chainguard FIPS Image, there's no guarantee that these packages will function properly; they may throw errors if the package has certain dependencies that aren't available in the image. Additionally, even if they do function properly there's no guarantee that added packages will use FIPS-validated cryptography.
Please refer to Chainguard's FIPS Commitment for more information.
The chainguard-base-fips
image includes a shell and package manager, making it useful for installing an application’s OS-level dependencies. The image will start in a shell by default:
You can run commands from within the shell like this, or you can run commands directly on your local machine without opening a shell:
chainguard-base-fips
is commonly used in Dockerfiles, as in the following example:
This example Dockerfile will update apk
and install the Redis server onto the base image.
You could use a Dockerfile like this to build a new image:
Following that, you can run the new image built from the chainguard-base-fips
image.
The chainguard-base-fips
image uses the ash shell from BusyBox by default.
If you need to port a bash and Debian centric entrypoint script to Chainguard Images, you can update your scripts to work in ash. Alternatively, you can install the shell that works with your scripts.
For example:
Oftentimes, you’ll need to install extra utilities to provide required dependencies for applications and scripts. These dependencies are likely to have different package names compared to other Linux distributions, so the apk search command can be very useful for finding the package you need.
For example, say you are porting a Dockerfile that uses the groupadd
command. You could convert this to the BusyBox addgroup
equivalent, but it’s also perfectly fine to add the groupadd
utility. The only issue is that there’s no groupadd
package, so you will have to search for it:
Another useful trick is the cmd: syntax
for finding packages that provide commands. For example, searching for ldd
returns multiple results:
But if you use the cmd:
syntax it will narrow down the results:
You can even use the syntax directly in apk add
:
The following resources provide helpful information on working with Chainguard's base images. Note that some of these resources focus on chainguard-base
and wolfi-base
— the free-tier alternative to the chainguard-base
image — but these same principles and practices apply to chainguard-base-fips
.
If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.
Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.
Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.
The main features of Chainguard Images include:
-dev
VariantsAs mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev
variant which does include a shell and package manager.
Although the -dev
image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev
variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.
That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev
variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev
variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.
To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.
Chainguard Images contain software packages that are direct or transitive dependencies. The following licenses were found in the "latest" version of this image:
Apache-2.0
GCC-exception-3.1
GPL-2.0-only
GPL-2.0-or-later
GPL-3.0-or-later
LGPL-2.1-or-later
MIT
For a complete list of licenses, please refer to this Image's SBOM.
Software license agreementThis is a FIPS validated image for FedRAMP compliance.
This image is STIG hardened and scanned against the DISA General Purpose Operating System SRG with reports available.
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