Get started with Policy Evaluation in Docker Scout
Beta
Policy Evaluation is a Beta feature of Docker Scout. This feature is available to organizations participating in the limited preview program for policies.
If you're interested in trying out this feature, reach out using the form on the Docker Scout product pageopen_in_new
In software supply chain management, maintaining the security and reliability of artifacts is a top priority. Policy Evaluation in Docker Scout introduces a layer of control, on top of existing analysis capabilities. It lets you define supply chain rules for your artifacts, and helps you track how your artifacts perform, relative to your rules and thresholds, over time.
Learn how you can use Policy Evaluation to ensure that your artifacts align with established best practices.
How it works
When you activate Docker Scout for a repository, images that you push are automatically analyzed. The analysis gives you insights about the composition of your images, including what packages they contain and what vulnerabilities they're exposed to. Policy Evaluation builds on top of the image analysis feature, interpreting the analysis results against the rules defined by policies.
A policy defines one or more criteria that your artifacts should fulfill. For example, one of the default policies in Docker Scout is the Critical vulnerabilities policy, which proclaims that your artifacts must not contain any critical vulnerabilities. If an artifact contains one or more vulnerabilities with a critical severity, that artifact fails the evaluation.
In Docker Scout, policies are designed to help you ratchet forward your security and supply chain stature. Where other tools focus on providing a pass or fail status, Docker Scout policies visualizes how small, incremental changes affect policy status, even when your artifacts don't meet the policy requirements (yet). By tracking how the fail gap changes over time, you more easily see whether your artifact is improving or deteriorating relative to policy.
Policies don't necessarily have to be related to application security and vulnerabilities. You can use policies to measure and track other aspects of supply chain management as well, such as base image dependencies and open-source licenses.
Default policies
Docker Scout ships the following three out-of-the-box policies:
These policies are turned on by default for Scout-enabled repositories. There's currently no way to turn off or configure these policies.
Critical and high vulnerabilities with fixes
This policy requires that your artifacts aren't exposed to known vulnerabilities with a critical or high severity, and where there's a fix version available. Essentially, this means that there's an easy fix that you can deploy for images that fail this policy: upgrade the vulnerable package to a version containing a fix for the vulnerability.
This policy only flags vulnerabilities that were published more than 30 days ago, with the rationale that newly discovered vulnerabilities shouldn't cause your evaluations to fail until you've had a chance to address them.
This policy is unfulfilled if an artifact is affected by one or more critical- or high-severity vulnerability, where a fix version is available.
Critical vulnerabilities
This policy requires that your artifacts contain no known critical vulnerabilities. The policy is unfulfilled if your artifact contains one or more critical vulnerabilities.
This policy flags all critical vulnerabilities, whether or not there's a fix version available.
Packages with GPL3+ licenses
This policy requires that your artifacts don't contain packages distributed under a GPL3+ copyleftopen_in_new license.
This policy is unfulfilled if your artifacts contain one or more packages with a violating license.