Virtualization

The Top 10 Container Security Tools

Discover the top container security tools with features such as runtime protection, container scanning, and centralized policy management.

The Top 10 Container Security Tools include:

Container security tools play a critical role in helping organization to adopt and secure their containerized and micro-service architecture. These tools aim to protect containerized applications from vulnerabilities, malware, and security breaches, while ensuring compliance and safeguarding sensitive information. The benefits of container security tools include improved container orchestration, vulnerability management, access control, and seamless integration with existing CI/CD pipelines.

Containers, and their respective orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes and Docker, have transformed the way organizations develop, deploy, and manage applications. They provide flexibility, scalability, and consistency in delivering applications across various environments. However, this type of technology also introduces new security challenges that need to be addressed in order to maintain a secure and compliant infrastructure.

The container security market is rapidly growing, with numerous vendors offering diverse solutions to address the unique security challenges posed by container environments. This guide will explore the top container security tools, highlighting their notable features, capabilities, and industry reputation. 

Wiz is a comprehensive cloud security platform, with a container and Kubernetes security solution designed to secure containerized applications and Kubernetes across their entire lifecycle, from development to deployment. Wiz offers expansive visibility throughout various Kubernetes setups, serverless containers, and standalone ones on virtual machines, ensuring there are no blind spots in your containerized environments.

The Wiz security graph enables teams to conduct in-depth risk assessments and prioritize container risks by analyzing data from containers, hosts, cloud providers, and Kubernetes APIs. The platform automatically detects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, excessively permissioned containers, internet-facing containers, and leaked secrets. Proactive measures can then be put into place to mitigate these risks, closing off potential attack paths into your environments.

Wiz also promotes efficient collaboration between development and security teams, facilitating a shift left approach to the prevention of security issues throughout the SDLC. Wiz verifies code infrastructure security and compliance verification during deployment, by scanning Kubernetes YAML files, Docker files, and Terraform. This ensures container images remain secure from the point of creation until runtime.

Wiz is compatible with a multitude of platforms—including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, and Red Hat Openshift. With its comprehensive approach to security and easy-to-use interface, Wiz provides a robust solution for ensuring the safety of containerized environments. Alongside container security, the Wiz Cloud Security delivers a comprehensive cloud protection solution, with cloud detection and response, cloud workload protection, and cloud security posture management. Wiz protects over 5 million cloud workloads and is trusted by 40% of Fortune 100 companies to date.

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Aikido Logo

Aikido is an automated web application security and container scanning solution designed to analyze your container operating system for any potential security vulnerabilities. It is compatible with several platforms such as Google Artifact Registry, AWS ECR, Azure Container Registry, Docker Hub, and GitLab.

Upon detection of any open source vulnerabilities, Aikido filters and removes unresolvable issues while prioritizing remaining issues according to your system architecture. The solution provides actionable instructions to expedite the fixing of critical issues. Alongside container scanning, Aikido also offers a comprehensive web application security platform.

Key features include vulnerability management with open source dependency scanning, secrets management, static code analysis, infrastructure code scanning, cloud security posture management, surface monitoring, license scanning, and end-of-life runtimes monitoring.

The platform also offers an automated triage system for alerting. Admins can create custom rules for alert prioritization, reducing false positives, and duplicate alerts are deleted automatically. Aikido is designed for easy integration with current security tools and offers support for all leading version control providers, cloud providers, and languages.

Aikido is a secure solution that complies with AICPA’s SOC 2 Type II & ISO 27001:2022 requirements. All vulnerability scans are run in test environments that are deleted post-analysis, ensuring data privacy. The platform requires read-only access to your data and cannot modify your code. Aikido’s comprehensive, automated application security features make it an efficient and comprehensive platform for code and cloud security needs.

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Aqua Logo

Aqua is a security solution designed for applications running on Docker Enterprise Edition or Community Edition, offering protection for both the DevOps pipeline and production workloads. Compatible with Linux and Windows, Aqua provides image assurance, container immutability, least-privilege enforcement, and a container firewall for Docker environments.

With Aqua, organizations can scan images within CI tools, registries, and Docker hosts to identify and address issues such as vulnerabilities, hard-coded secrets, and image configurations. Aqua’s image assurance feature scans images for vulnerabilities, malware, embedded secrets, and configuration issues, allowing for custom policies that determine which images can run on Docker hosts. The solution also protects applications during runtime with multiple layers of security, such as enforcing container immutability, utilizing machine-learned behavioral profiles, and isolating containers from hosts. In addition to securing Docker environments, Aqua offers secrets management, securely delivering encrypted secrets to containers during runtime and integrating with existing enterprise vaults.

Compliance checks according to the CIS Docker Benchmark can also be run to evaluate the security posture of Kubernetes environments. Aqua’s granular security events auditing enables a detailed event stream of Docker-related commands and can be integrated with various monitoring and log management tools.

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Google Logo

Google Cloud offers a containerization solution that is based on over a decade of experience in deploying billions of containers per week. With containerization, development teams can work more efficiently and scale their operations effectively. Google Cloud creates a secure environment for developing and deploying software more rapidly, without compromising security.

Google Cloud leverages Kubernetes to manage machines and services on behalf of developers. This system significantly reduces the time and resources required for DevOps tasks, leading to increased reliability and less stress associated with these tasks. Google Cloud’s container-native networking employs the Kubernetes Defined Network, which is fully integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This integration offers simple-to-use solutions for load balancing, routing, security, and network observability, as well as access to Google’s global network and the benefits of multi-cluster networking for enhanced resilience and availability.

By using GKE, users can establish policy guardrails and let the system enforce them in a uniform and seamless manner. Additionally, a defense-in-depth architecture can be easily implemented with zero trust integrated into every layer, ensuring strong security for Kubernetes environments.

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Palo Alto Logo

Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive container security solution that supports public and private clouds, spanning the full application lifecycle from code to cloud. It provides full lifecycle security for repositories, images, and containers, scanning container images and enforcing policies as part of continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows.

Prisma Cloud continuously prioritizes vulnerabilities in CI/CD pipelines and runs containers across public and private clouds. The solution leverages more than 30 upstream data sources to minimize false positives, integrates vulnerability management to scan repositories, registries, pipelines, and runtime environments, as well as offering over 400 customizable compliance checks. Prisma Cloud also allows users to set license compliance levels, manage image trust, and implement compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle. With CI/CD security, Prisma Cloud checks source code and images for vulnerabilities and compliance issues across repositories whilst integrating security into CI tooling. It also provides software composition analysis at every stage of its lifecycle.

Runtime defense is bolstered with single console support for containers across various environments and automatically profiles active containers to detect and block anomalous behavior. Additionally, Prisma Cloud offers access control options to minimize the attack surface area by securing user and control plane access to Docker and Kubernetes environments.

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PingSafe Logo

PingSafe offers a comprehensive security solution for containers and Kubernetes clusters, enabling businesses to build and deploy containerized applications without compromising on security. The platform achieves this by adopting an agentless approach, scanning containers and nodes automatically to eliminate blind spots, and strengthen security with thorough analysis.

The platform helps protect containers across the entire development and deployment lifecycle. By offering unique attacker intelligence that mimics and simulates attacker perspectives and methods, PingSafe enables organizations to take proactive measures against potential breaches. Additionally, the platform provides contextual and prioritized alerts to help businesses better understand the complexities of cloud resource interactions and vulnerability impacts, leading to efficient risk mitigation. PingSafe aids in detecting misconfigurations in cloud infrastructures, offering complete visibility into the Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM) for identification of vulnerabilities and implementing appropriate measures.

The platform also monitors compliance and scans images for known vulnerabilities, helping organizations find and fix potential risks before exploitation. The contextual alerts generated by analyzing container and Kubernetes clusters facilitate timely detection and mitigation of possible security issues.

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Red Hat Ansible Logo

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (ACS) for Kubernetes is a Kubernetes-native security platform that is designed to help organizations securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications. ACS for Kubernetes is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, assisting in securing the software supply chain by integrating with CI/CD pipelines and image registries.

This solution helps to identify and rectify vulnerable and misconfigured images, while its integration with Cosign/sigstore delivers security attestation for assets. Additionally, ACS for Kubernetes provides Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) capabilities to harden and protect the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure by continuously scanning against CIS benchmarks and other security best practices. It also defends workloads by implementing deploy-time and runtime policies to prevent risky deployments from running, and monitors system-level events and combines behavioral baselining and allowlisting to detect potential threats, as well as provides key insights through interactive dashboards and audit reports.

With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, organizations can strengthen their Kubernetes environments and workloads for more secure and stable applications. The solution is compatible with major cloud and hybrid platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, and Google GKE.

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Snyk Logo

Snyk is a container and Kubernetes security solution that assists developers and DevOps teams in discovering, prioritizing, and resolving vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle, before workloads reach production. With a developer-first approach, Snyk has successfully facilitated the discovery and remediation of tens of millions of vulnerabilities and provides developer-ready base image recommendations and upgrades to address vulnerabilities.

The platform offers flexible image workflows, actionable advice, continuous monitoring, and secure dependency management. Additionally, Snyk Container shares the risks present in each image, offers one-click upgrades, and suggests alternative images. Developers can prioritize vulnerabilities, thereby allowing them to focus on critical issues based on risk signals such as exploit maturity and insecure workload configurations. Snyk’s integrated IDE checks enable developers to detect vulnerabilities in base image dependencies, Dockerfile commands, and Kubernetes workloads during the coding process, saving time and resources.

The platform’s native Git scanning and monitoring allows pull requests and project repositories to be managed, helping to find and fix vulnerabilities faster. Snyk ensures security from pipeline to production with automatic scanning during build, testing, and whilst monitoring active environments. Overall, Snyk helps organizations prioritize top container risks and maintain a secure development environment.

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Sysdig Logo

Sysdig Secure is a security platform designed for containers and Kubernetes environments. Its native Kubernetes integration and DevOps-friendly approach helps organizations to manage vulnerabilities, configurations, and compliance risks in container-based applications, providing an audit trail for easier incident response.

With Sysdig Secure, users can reduce risk by employing image scanning in their CI/CD pipelines and runtime environments. The platform offers managed policies based on Falco and machine learning for securing runtime operations. In addition, Sysdig Secure helps block risky images, fix configuration issues, and detect potentially malicious Kubernetes API activity while maintaining consistent security policies through Open Policy Agent (OPA). The platform also aids in compliance management for container and Kubernetes environments by validating CIS Benchmarks and industry standards such as PCI, NIST, and SOC2. Automated compliance and governance are made possible with the help of OPA policies.

Sysdig Secure offers tools for threat detection and response, making it easier to identify and address vulnerabilities, exploits, and other malicious activities. In case of incidents, the platform can automatically terminate malicious containers or processes and provide a comprehensive audit of users, commands, files, and network activity for further investigation and analysis.

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Tenable Logo

Tenable Cloud Security is a comprehensive solution that focuses on integrated container security to ensure efficient exposure management. It offers end-to-end visibility of public and private container registries and includes vulnerability assessment, malware detection, and policy enforcement throughout the software development lifecycle.

The Tenable One Exposure Management Platform provides extensive visibility, context, and prioritization of an organization’s entire attack surface. By integrating with developer build systems, Tenable Cloud Security addresses complex security challenges within hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also works seamlessly with familiar tools, enabling DevSecOps processes to run effectively whilst providing visibility into vulnerabilities across the development lifecycle. Tenable Cloud Security ensures container compliance with multiple policies and verifies they do not deviate from approved baselines prior to production. If container images exceed risk thresholds, developers will receive immediate notifications with remediation advice.

This solution also offers a no-code policy editor for creating custom policies that comply with corporate and industry standards. Tenable Cloud Security supports secure building, visualization of hybrid application exposure, secure management, and deployment of containers, thereby minimizing risk for a smooth migration to cloud environments.

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The Top 10 Container Security Tools