Implementing Aqua Security For Container Scanning

Implementing Aqua Security for Container Scanning

Overview

Aqua Security provides Trivy, the world's most popular open-source universal security scanner, designed to find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, SBOM data, and license issues in containers, Kubernetes, code repositories, and cloud environments. Trivy covers OS packages (Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.) and language-specific dependencies (npm, pip, Maven, Go modules, Cargo, etc.) with vulnerability databases sourced from NVD, vendor advisories, and GitHub Security Advisories. The enterprise Aqua Platform extends Trivy with centralized policy management, runtime protection, and compliance reporting.

When to Use

• When deploying or configuring implementing aqua security for container scanning capabilities in your environment
• When establishing security controls aligned to compliance requirements
• When building or improving security architecture for this domain
• When conducting security assessments that require this implementation

Common Misconfigurations & Verification

These mistakes let vulnerable images ship while Trivy appears to "pass":

• --exit-code 0 everywhere. A scan run with trivy image --exit-code 0 only reports; it never fails the build. Use a gating invocation trivy image --exit-code 1 --severity CRITICAL,HIGH (the GitLab template pattern of a report pass followed by a real --exit-code 1 pass is correct — keep both).
• continue-on-error: true / soft_fail. In GitHub Actions the trivy-action exit-code: '1' is undone by a job-level continue-on-error: true; remove it on the gating step.
• Scanning the wrong tag. image-ref/CS_IMAGE pinned to :latest instead of ${{ github.sha }} scans a stale image. Scan the exact digest you just built.
• Stale vuln DB or --skip-db-update misses recent CVEs; let Trivy refresh its DB in CI.
• Over-broad .trivyignore (or unexpired exp: dates) silently suppresses real CRITICALs — review it.
• --ignore-unfixed hides fixable CVEs if you actually want to gate on them.

Concrete verification: Build an image FROM a known-vulnerable base (e.g. debian:10 or an old python:3.6) and run your gating step. Confirm the job exits non-zero and fails the pipeline, then confirm a clean patched image passes. This proves the exit code is honored, not swallowed.

Prerequisites

• Docker installed for local image scanning
• CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, etc.)
• Container registry access (Docker Hub, ECR, GCR, ACR, Harbor)
• Trivy CLI (trivy) or Trivy Operator for Kubernetes
• Aqua Platform license for enterprise features (optional)

Core Scanning Capabilities

Image Vulnerability Scanning

Trivy scans container images layer by layer, identifying CVEs in OS packages and application dependencies. It supports scanning local images, remote registry images, and tar archives.

# Scan a remote image
trivy image python:3.11-slim

# Scan with severity filter
trivy image --severity HIGH,CRITICAL nginx:latest

# Scan and fail CI if critical CVEs found
trivy image --exit-code 1 --severity CRITICAL myapp:latest

# Generate SBOM in CycloneDX format
trivy image --format cyclonedx --output sbom.json myapp:latest

Filesystem and Repository Scanning

# Scan project directory for vulnerabilities in dependencies
trivy fs --scanners vuln,secret,misconfig .

# Scan a specific lockfile
trivy fs --scanners vuln package-lock.json

# Scan git repository
trivy repo https://github.com/org/project

Kubernetes Scanning with Trivy Operator

The Trivy Operator runs inside a Kubernetes cluster and continuously scans workloads:

# Install Trivy Operator via Helm
helm repo add aqua https://aquasecurity.github.io/helm-charts/
helm repo update
helm install trivy-operator aqua/trivy-operator \
  --namespace trivy-system \
  --create-namespace \
  --set trivy.severity="HIGH,CRITICAL" \
  --set operator.scanJobTimeout="5m"

The operator creates VulnerabilityReport and ConfigAuditReport custom resources for each workload.

IaC Misconfiguration Scanning

# Scan Terraform files
trivy config --severity HIGH,CRITICAL ./terraform/

# Scan Dockerfile for misconfigurations
trivy config Dockerfile

# Scan Kubernetes manifests
trivy config ./k8s-manifests/

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions

name: Container Security Scan
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:

jobs:
  scan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Build Docker image
        run: docker build -t myapp:${{ github.sha }} .

      - name: Run Trivy vulnerability scanner
        uses: aquasecurity/trivy-action@master
        with:
          image-ref: 'myapp:${{ github.sha }}'
          format: 'sarif'
          output: 'trivy-results.sarif'
          severity: 'CRITICAL,HIGH'
          exit-code: '1'

      - name: Upload Trivy scan results to GitHub Security tab
        uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
        if: always()
        with:
          sarif_file: 'trivy-results.sarif'

GitLab CI

container_scanning:
  stage: security
  image:
    name: aquasec/trivy:latest
    entrypoint: [""]
  variables:
    FULL_IMAGE_NAME: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
  script:
    - trivy image --exit-code 0 --format template --template "@/contrib/gitlab.tpl"
      --output gl-container-scanning-report.json $FULL_IMAGE_NAME
    - trivy image --exit-code 1 --severity CRITICAL $FULL_IMAGE_NAME
  artifacts:
    reports:
      container_scanning: gl-container-scanning-report.json

Jenkins Pipeline

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                sh 'docker build -t myapp:${BUILD_NUMBER} .'
            }
        }
        stage('Security Scan') {
            steps {
                sh '''
                    trivy image --exit-code 1 \
                      --severity HIGH,CRITICAL \
                      --format json \
                      --output trivy-report.json \
                      myapp:${BUILD_NUMBER}
                '''
            }
            post {
                always {
                    archiveArtifacts artifacts: 'trivy-report.json'
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Policy Configuration

Trivy Policy with OPA/Rego

Create .trivy/policy.rego for custom policy enforcement:

package trivy

deny[msg] {
    input.Results[_].Vulnerabilities[_].Severity == "CRITICAL"
    msg := "Critical vulnerabilities found in image"
}

deny[msg] {
    input.Results[_].Vulnerabilities[vuln]
    vuln.FixedVersion != ""
    vuln.Severity == "HIGH"
    msg := sprintf("Fixable HIGH vulnerability: %s", [vuln.VulnerabilityID])
}

Ignore File Configuration

Create .trivyignore for accepted risks:

# Accepted risk: vulnerability in test dependency only
CVE-2023-12345

# Accepted until expiry date
CVE-2024-67890 exp:2025-06-01

SBOM Generation and Management

# Generate CycloneDX SBOM
trivy image --format cyclonedx --output sbom-cyclonedx.json myapp:latest

# Generate SPDX SBOM
trivy image --format spdx-json --output sbom-spdx.json myapp:latest

# Scan an existing SBOM for new vulnerabilities
trivy sbom sbom-cyclonedx.json

Monitoring and Reporting

References

• Trivy Documentation
• Trivy GitHub Repository
• Trivy Operator for Kubernetes
• Aqua Security Platform
• CycloneDX SBOM Specification