That's why you only pull official images and signed ones.

And that's why I have an in-between step.

Harbor.io allows you to configure it as a proxy with approval mechanism and cve scanning

Docker content trust (ie signature checking) is disabled by default.

We won't even do this for webpages, but we find it a fine default for code that executes inside critical infrastructure.

It's utter madness. Cool to see someone is doing something about it.

We have collectively decided as an industry to place infinite trust in a handful of vendors for the sake of convenience.

Auth providers (OIDC), cloud providers, and numerous software repositories and SaaS providers effectively have root on the entire universe. A major compromise of any number of these large vendors could expose millions of systems to total compromise.

Resultantly, these systems are almost certainly already compromised by organizations skilled enough to not get caught.

I'd say nation states, which means the US and possibly other nation states effectively have root on virtually all SaaS systems.

It's exactly the architecture I'd promote if I wanted a total panopticon, but I'm not suggesting a conspiracy. Ease of use is the most powerful force in computing and history has shown that people will trade privacy, security, freedom, cost, and virtually anything else for it.

It does make a certain amount of sense. Time is non-fungible; no amount of money can buy more of it. So ease of use by saving time is extremely valuable and commands a high price.

The problem is that IMO the cost of all this SaaS automation is higher than most people understand. There's some rather huge hidden costs here.

What's TAO?

I am not sure but maybe referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations

Might be referring to “Tailored Access Operations” which was an NSA office

You could say this about any service serving software artifacts?

Unsigned ones, yes.

That just moves the trust requirement up the chain, and assumes that the image wasn’t compromised pre-signing (either intentionally or unintentionally)

It doesn't, it removes/reduces one step, and leaves another one that is there regardless.

What's the alternative? I don't know of any reason to think that tarballs or <os> installers are any better. I suppose I could clone the code and look for security flaws myself but I'm no expert and on something like nginx it's certain to be a waste of my time.

OCI registries.

Harbor + Notary + admission controllers - AKA private image repository with image signing.

Sigstore. Another method for signing & verifying artifacts.

> it's the same as "curl | bash"

While I understand the argument you're making, the exposure of running "curl | bash" on your local machine is much higher than running arbitrary code inside of a container.

Even if you specify a hash, are you actually checking all of the code and binaries in that image?

What about the image base (e.g. Alpine, Debian) and their packages?

There have been a lot of container escape exploits

Sure... but it's still not "the same as" running on your host.

That depends on how you're running it. You wouldn't want a compromised image to be the base for your build containers, which get access to your product's source code via volume mount, or to secret keys via environment variables.

I'm a big fan of Nix Flakes but they appear to have the same issue here as "curl | bash".

I mention this because Flakes can do much of what Docker can do, but do not use containers or virtualization.

The official NixPkgs are carefully vetted. Nix Flakes make it more convenient to pull in sources from outside NixPkgs.

As Nix Flakes become more prevalent, perhaps there needs to be some way to containerize them. There are more benefits to Nix Flakes than native execution so containerizing them somehow might be an acceptable compromise.

> As Nix Flakes become more prevalent, perhaps there needs to be some way to containerize them.

You may be interested in nix snapshotter, which can run nix packages in containerd.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37407758