Chainguard Container for falco-no-driver

A minimal, wolfi-based image for falco-no-driver. This streamlined variant of Falco designed for real-time security monitoring on Linux, replaces the traditional kernel module with eBPF technology, thus enhancing portability in containerized environments.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/falco-no-driver:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

How does falco-no-driver differ over falco?

The primary distinction between falco, and falco-no-driver (i.e this image), lies in their approach to monitoring system calls.

Falco requires a kernel-specific module to hook into the system an monitor system calls.

In contrast, falco-no-driver does not depend on a kernel-specific module, instead leveraging eBPF (modern-bpf driver). This eliminates the need for loading sepatate kernel modules and makes the image more portable, between environments.

When we talk about falco-no-driver, this means no kernel drivers. falco-no-driver is bundled with the modern-bpf driver itself. This can be confusing and is worth clarifying.

Disclaimer: falco doesn't run on macOS!

If you are intending on testing this image locally, note that falco does not run on macOS. If you attempt to run the image it will fail to launch. See the following falco documentation, where they recommend setting up a linux VM.

Note: You can launch the image on mac by passing in the --nodriver argument instead of --modern-bpf, but other than running the service, it'll not collect anything, so shouldn't be used in place of a linux environment for testing.

Running falco-no-driver

Please refer to the upstream documentation for instructions on how to configure and run falco-no-driver. The below examples are intended as demonstrating how to substitute with the chainguard image, and are not comprehensive.

Docker

docker run --rm -i -t \
    --privileged \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/host/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
    cgr.dev/chainguard/falco:latest falco --modern-bpf

Helm chart

The deployment of Falco in a Kubernetes cluster is managed through a Helm chart. Documentation on this helm chart is available here

To install falco-no-driver image supporting modern bpf probe,

    helm repo add falcosecurity https://falcosecurity.github.io/charts
    helm repo update

    helm install falco \
    --namespace falco --create-namespace  \
    --set image.registry=cgr.dev \
    --set image.repository=chainguard/falco-no-driver \
    --set image.tag=latest \
    --set driver.kind=modern-bpf \
    --set falcoctl.image.registry=cgr.dev \
    --set falcoctl.image.repository=chainguard/falcoctl \
    --set falcoctl.image.tag=latest \
    --wait falcosecurity/falco

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard Containers are minimal container images that are secure by default.

In many cases, the Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Containers are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a -dev variant.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to leverage the -dev variants, copying application artifacts into a final minimal container that offers a reduced attack surface that won’t allow package installations or logins.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Containers, please visit Chainguard Academy and Chainguard Courses.

In addition to Containers, Chainguard offers VMs and Libraries. Contact Chainguard to access additional products.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.