Enterprises today are rapidly adopting containers to streamline development and accelerate software delivery. This shift empowers developers and DevOps teams to deliver value to customers faster. However, security teams are challenged to keep pace, needing to ensure container pipelines are secure and applications deployed in containers maintain a strong security posture.
During a conversation at a major industry event, I spoke with a security engineer from a large organization who was grappling with these exact challenges. His role involved working closely with development and DevOps management to secure modern web and mobile applications throughout their lifecycle. They were seeking effective ways to integrate security seamlessly into their containerized application lifecycle.
Key Improvements with Container Scanning Tools
Our discussion revealed that while the engineer’s company had experimented with open-source tools for basic image scanning, they lacked a comprehensive solution for continuous registry scanning or runtime environment visibility. Their primary objectives were clear:
- Identify and remediate high-risk vulnerabilities within container images.
- Implement proactive tooling to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production.
- Empower developers with access to trusted, secure images.
- Achieve comprehensive runtime visibility across all containerized environments.
The engineer highlighted the urgency, stating, “We’re running containers in production, hoping we are secure, but that’s not a sustainable strategy. If we adopted Twistlock, what immediate security benefits could we gain and build upon?”
This is a common and crucial question from teams embracing containers. Let’s explore how Twistlock, now part of Prisma Cloud, delivers immediate and impactful security improvements across the CI/CD pipeline, container registry, and runtime environments.
Seamlessly Integrate Security into Your CI/CD Pipeline
Twistlock’s approach to container security emphasizes integrating security and compliance deep within the CI/CD process. The most effective way to secure cloud-native applications is to prevent vulnerable images from progressing through the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in the first place.
Twistlock achieves this by integrating directly into your existing build and deployment workflows. You can define granular policies to automatically pass or fail builds based on detected vulnerabilities and compliance violations. This ensures that only secure images are pushed to the registry or deployed to production.
For instance, a policy could be configured as follows:
“For my payment application build, automatically block any build affected by a CVE with a high CVSS rating if a vendor fix is currently available.”
Twistlock offers a dedicated Jenkins plugin, as showcased in the Blue Ocean view above. Furthermore, it integrates effortlessly with other popular CI tools like CircleCI, Azure DevOps, AWS CodeBuild, or Google Cloud Container Builder using twistcli, Twistlock’s command-line scanner. This ensures developers receive immediate feedback on vulnerability status with every build execution. In the earlier example, the security engineer could collaborate with development teams to prioritize and remediate images with the most critical vulnerabilities, subsequently establishing policies to enforce appropriate vulnerability and compliance thresholds within their CI/CD pipelines.
Enhance Control and Trust with Trusted Images
As organizations mature in their container adoption and gain deeper insights into their image landscape, they can leverage Twistlock’s Trusted Images feature. This powerful capability allows for fine-grained control over developer access to registries, specific images, and even individual layers within images. Trusted Images guarantee that developers utilize verified and approved sources for their container images. This feature directly facilitates the implementation of CIS best practices for container security, bolstering overall security posture.
Achieve Deep Visibility into Your Container Registry
A fundamental aspect of container security is maintaining continuous visibility into your container registry. Twistlock provides robust scanning and continuous monitoring of your registry for vulnerabilities. This vulnerability management capability directly addresses a critical need expressed by the security engineer. Regardless of the registry solution in use—and Twistlock seamlessly integrates with all major registry providers—Twistlock continuously scans images, providing detailed vulnerability findings and intelligent risk prioritization.
The demo environment screenshot above illustrates Twistlock scanning public images on Docker Hub. Twistlock delivers continuous monitoring, providing up-to-date vulnerability and compliance status. Furthermore, it allows for granular analysis, offering a layer-by-layer view of vulnerabilities within each image. This level of detail is invaluable for targeted remediation efforts.
Prioritize Remediation with Runtime Intelligence
While build and registry scanning are crucial, runtime security is a key differentiator for Twistlock. Runtime defense capabilities are essential for effectively managing risk in live container environments and guiding remediation prioritization.
Twistlock extends beyond static scanning by continuously monitoring running containers for vulnerability changes. It generates a dynamic risk score for each identified vulnerability, factoring in not just CVSS scores but also a range of contextual metrics specific to your environment. These metrics include:
- Internet exposure of the container.
- Presence of open listening ports.
- Applied security profiles.
By incorporating these factors, Twistlock provides a prioritized vulnerability stack ranking tailored to your specific environment, highlighting the most exploitable vulnerabilities. This enables security teams to focus remediation efforts on the highest-risk assets first. Additionally, users can quickly search for any new CVE or security issue within the runtime environment to pinpoint exactly which containers are impacted.
The Twistlock Vulnerability Explorer screenshot above showcases the top 10 critical vulnerabilities within a sample environment. Expanding the Risk Tree reveals the precise image, container name, and host where each vulnerability resides. The risk score incorporates contextual data, empowering teams to accurately assess the impact of vulnerabilities within specific deployments.
Conclusion: Elevate Your Container Security with Twistlock
Prisma Cloud, powered by Twistlock, offers significant advantages for organizations seeking to comprehensively secure their container environments. From in-depth vulnerability and compliance analysis to seamless CI/CD integration and intelligent runtime risk prioritization, Twistlock provides a robust solution. While this overview highlighted key features for vulnerability management and compliance, Prisma Cloud and Twistlock deliver a broader spectrum of immediate benefits.
To delve deeper into Twistlock’s capabilities, explore our latest demo recording.
