Container Image Scanning: Finding and Managing Vulnerabilities

Calendar February 22, 2026
Kubernetes
Intermediate
Vulnerability-Scanning, Ci-Cd-Security, Policy-Enforcement
Image-Scanning, Trivy, Grype, Cve, Vulnerability-Management, Admission-Controllers
Trivy, Grype, Snyk, Kyverno, Opa-Gatekeeper

Container Image Scanning#

Every container image you deploy carries an operating system, libraries, and application dependencies. Each of those components can have known vulnerabilities. Image scanning compares the packages in your image against databases of CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and tells you what is exploitable.

Scanning is not optional. It is a baseline hygiene practice that belongs in every CI pipeline.

How CVE Databases Work#

Scanners pull vulnerability data from multiple sources: the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), vendor-specific feeds (Red Hat, Debian, Alpine, Ubuntu security trackers), and language-specific advisory databases (GitHub Advisory Database for npm/pip/go). Each CVE has a severity rating based on CVSS scores:

Software Bill of Materials and Vulnerability Management

Calendar February 22, 2026
Security
Intermediate
Sbom-Generation, Vulnerability-Scanning, Cve-Prioritization, Remediation-Tracking, Pipeline-Security-Integration
Sbom, Vulnerability-Management, Syft, Trivy, Spdx, Cyclonedx, Cve, Cicd, Grype, Dependency-Scanning
Syft, Trivy, Grype, Cosign, Oras, Dependabot, Renovate, Github-Actions

What Is an SBOM#

A Software Bill of Materials is a machine-readable inventory of every component in a software artifact. It lists packages, libraries, versions, licenses, and dependency relationships. An SBOM answers the question: what exactly is inside this container image, binary, or repository?

When a new CVE drops, organizations without SBOMs scramble to determine which systems are affected. Organizations with SBOMs query a database and have the answer in seconds.