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Chapter 6. Clair Security Scanning

6.1. What is Clair?
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Clair is a set of micro services that can be used with Red Hat Quay to perform vulnerability scanning of container images associated with a set of Linux operating systems. The micro services design of Clair makes it appropriate to run in a highly scalable configuration, where components can be scaled separately as appropriate for enterprise environments.

Clair uses the following vulnerability databases to scan for issues in your images:

  • Alpine SecDB database
  • AWS UpdateInfo
  • Debian Oval database
  • Oracle Oval database
  • RHEL Oval database
  • SUSE Oval database
  • Ubuntu Oval database
  • Pyup.io (python) database

For information on how Clair does security mapping with the different databases, see ClairCore Severity Mapping.

Note

With the release of Red Hat Quay 3.4, the new Clair V4 (image registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8 fully replaces the prior Clair V2 (image quay.io/redhat/clair-jwt). See below for how to run V2 in read-only mode while V4 is updating.

While Clair V4 (registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8:v3.4.7) is the version of Clair that Red Hat Quay uses, both it and the prior Clair V2 (quay.io/redhat/clair-jwt) can run concurrently with Red Hat Quay. This is useful for existing Red Hat Quay deployments that have relied on Clair V2 but wish to have no interruption of scan results using Clair V4. All new image scans will happen in Clair V4 and existing images will be re-scanned automatically. When scan results are requested through Red Hat Quay, if the new Clair V4 results are not available, the existing Clair V2 results will be retrieved. Once the Clair V2 scan results are not needed, it may be decommissioned and removed from Red Hat Quay’s configuration.

The progress of rescanning images may be monitored via Red Hat Quay API. (Refer to Using The Quay API for details): 

/secscan/_backfill_status

This will produce a simple JSON response with the percentage of completed manifests scanned by Clair V4: 

{"backfill_percent": 73.4}

Once the majority of the images in your registry have been scanned by Clair V4, the Clair V2 deployment should be removed entirely (both running containers and removal from config).

6.2.1. Deploying Via the Quay Operator
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To set up Clair V4 on a new Red Hat Quay deployment on OpenShift, it is highly recommended to use the Quay Operator. By default, the Quay Operator will install or upgrade a Clair deployment along with your Red Hat Quay deployment and configure Clair security scanning automatically.

6.2.2. Manually Deploying Clair
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To configure Clair V4 on an existing Red Hat Quay OpenShift deployment running Clair V2, first ensure Red Hat Quay has been upgraded to at least version 3.4.0. Then use the following steps to manually set up Clair V4 alongside Clair V2.

  1. Set your current project to the name of the project in which Red Hat Quay is running. For example: 

    $ oc project quay-enterprise

  2. Create a Postgres deployment file for Clair v4 (for example, clairv4-postgres.yaml) as follows.

    clairv4-postgres.yaml

    ---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: clairv4-postgres
  namespace: quay-enterprise
  labels:
    quay-component: clairv4-postgres
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      quay-component: clairv4-postgres
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        quay-component: clairv4-postgres
    spec:
      volumes:
        - name: postgres-data
          persistentVolumeClaim:
            claimName: clairv4-postgres
      containers:
        - name: postgres
          image: postgres:11.5
          imagePullPolicy: "IfNotPresent"
          ports:
            - containerPort: 5432
          env:
            - name: POSTGRES_USER
              value: "postgres"
            - name: POSTGRES_DB
              value: "clair"
            - name: POSTGRES_PASSWORD
              value: "postgres"
            - name: PGDATA
              value: "/etc/postgres/data"
          volumeMounts:
            - name: postgres-data
              mountPath: "/etc/postgres"
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: clairv4-postgres
  labels:
    quay-component: clairv4-postgres
spec:
  accessModes:
    - "ReadWriteOnce"
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: "5Gi"
    volumeName: "clairv4-postgres"
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: clairv4-postgres
  labels:
    quay-component: clairv4-postgres
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  ports:
    - port: 5432
      protocol: TCP
      name: postgres
      targetPort: 5432
  selector:
    quay-component: clairv4-postgres

  3. Deploy the postgres database as follows: 

    $ oc create -f ./clairv4-postgres.yaml

  4. Create a Clair config.yaml file to use for Clair v4. For example:

    config.yaml

    introspection_addr: :8089
http_listen_addr: :8080
log_level: debug
indexer:
  connstring: host=clairv4-postgres port=5432 dbname=clair user=postgres password=postgres sslmode=disable
  scanlock_retry: 10
  layer_scan_concurrency: 5
  migrations: true
matcher:
  connstring: host=clairv4-postgres port=5432 dbname=clair user=postgres password=postgres sslmode=disable
  max_conn_pool: 100
  run: ""
  migrations: true
  indexer_addr: clair-indexer
# tracing and metrics
trace:
  name: "jaeger"
  probability: 1
  jaeger:
    agent_endpoint: "localhost:6831"
    service_name: "clair"
metrics:
  name: "prometheus"

More information about Clair’s configuration format can be found in upstream Clair documentation.

  1. Create a secret from the Clair config.yaml: 

    $ oc create secret generic clairv4-config-secret --from-file=./config.yaml

  2. Create the Clair v4 deployment file (for example, clair-combo.yaml) and modify it as necessary:

    clair-combo.yaml

    ---
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    quay-component: clair-combo
  name: clair-combo
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      quay-component: clair-combo
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        quay-component: clair-combo
    spec:
      containers:
        - image: registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8:v3.4.7
    1 
    
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
          name: clair-combo
          env:
            - name: CLAIR_CONF
              value: /clair/config.yaml
            - name: CLAIR_MODE
              value: combo
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080
              name: clair-http
              protocol: TCP
            - containerPort: 8089
              name: clair-intro
              protocol: TCP
          volumeMounts:
            - mountPath: /clair/
              name: config
      imagePullSecrets:
        - name: redhat-pull-secret
      restartPolicy: Always
      volumes:
        - name: config
          secret:
            secretName: clairv4-config-secret
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: clairv4
    2 
    
  labels:
    quay-component: clair-combo
spec:
  ports:
    - name: clair-http
      port: 80
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 8080
    - name: clair-introspection
      port: 8089
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 8089
  selector:
    quay-component: clair-combo
  type: ClusterIP

    1
    Change image to latest clair image name and version.
    2
    With the Service set to clairv4, the scanner endpoint for Clair v4 is entered later into the Red Hat Quay config.yaml in the SECURITY_SCANNER_V4_ENDPOINT as http://clairv4.

  3. Create the Clair v4 deployment as follows: 

    $ oc create -f ./clair-combo.yaml

  4. Modify the config.yaml file for your Red Hat Quay deployment to add the following entries at the end: 

    FEATURE_SECURITY_SCANNER: true
SECURITY_SCANNER_V4_ENDPOINT: http://clairv4
    1
    1
    Identify the Clair v4 service endpoint

  5. Redeploy the modified config.yaml to the secret containing that file (for example, quay-enterprise-config-secret: 

    $ oc delete secret quay-enterprise-config-secret
$ oc create secret generic quay-enterprise-config-secret --from-file=./config.yaml
  6. For the new config.yaml to take effect, you need to restart the Red Hat Quay pods. Simply deleting the quay-app pods causes pods with the updated configuration to be deployed.

At this point, images in any of the organizations identified in the namespace whitelist will be scanned by Clair v4.

For Red Hat Quay deployments not running on OpenShift, it is possible to configure Clair security scanning manually. Red Hat Quay deployments already running Clair V2 can use the instructions below to add Clair V4 to their deployment.

  1. Deploy a (preferably fault-tolerant) Postgres database server. Note that Clair requires the uuid-ossp extension to be added to its Postgres database. If the user supplied in Clair’s config.yaml has the necessary privileges to create the extension then it will be added automatically by Clair itself. If not, then the extension must be added before starting Clair. If the extension is not present, the following error will be displayed when Clair attempts to start. 

    ERROR: Please load the "uuid-ossp" extension. (SQLSTATE 42501)

  2. Create a Clair config file in a specific folder (e.g. /etc/clairv4/config/config.yaml) file.

    config.yaml

    introspection_addr: :8089
http_listen_addr: :8080
log_level: debug
indexer:
  connstring: host=clairv4-postgres port=5432 dbname=clair user=postgres password=postgres sslmode=disable
  scanlock_retry: 10
  layer_scan_concurrency: 5
  migrations: true
matcher:
  connstring: host=clairv4-postgres port=5432 dbname=clair user=postgres password=postgres sslmode=disable
  max_conn_pool: 100
  run: ""
  migrations: true
  indexer_addr: clair-indexer
notifier:
  connstring: host=clairv4-postgres port=5432 dbname=clair user=postgres password=postgres sslmode=disable
  delivery_interval: 1m
  poll_interval: 5m
  migrations: true

# tracing and metrics
trace:
  name: "jaeger"
  probability: 1
  jaeger:
    agent_endpoint: "localhost:6831"
    service_name: "clair"
metrics:
  name: "prometheus"

More information about Clair’s configuration format can be found in upstream Clair documentation.

  1. Run Clair via the container image, mounting in the configuration from the file you created. 

    $ podman run -p 8080:8080 -p 8089:8089 -e CLAIR_CONF=/clair/config.yaml -e CLAIR_MODE=combo -v /etc/clair4/config:/clair -d registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8:v3.4.7
  2. Follow the remaining instructions from the previous section for configuring Red Hat Quay to use the new Clair V4 endpoint.

Running multiple Clair containers in this fashion is also possible, but for deployment scenarios beyond a single container the use of a container orchestrator like Kubernetes or OpenShift is strongly recommended.

6.4. Using Clair
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  1. Log in to your Red Hat Quay cluster and select an organization for which you have configured Clair scanning.

  2. Select a repository from that organization that holds some images and select Tags from the left navigation. The following figure shows an example of a repository with two images that have been scanned:

    Security scan information appears for scanned repository images

  3. If vulnerabilities are found, select to under the Security Scan column for the image to see either all vulnerabilities or those that are fixable. The following figure shows information on all vulnerabilities found:

    See all vulnerabilities or only those that are fixable

6.5. Clair Notifications
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When Clair received a new vulnerability affecting a previously indexed manifest, it will notify Red Hat Quay so that a new scan can be requested. Only the most severe vulnerabilities trigger a notification to avoid excessive scan requests. This notification mechanism is automatically set up when Clair is configured in Red Hat Quay’s configuration.

Clair notifications can also be set up for external consumption via AMQP and STOMP protocols. For details on how to set this up please consult the upstream Clair documentation.

Clair utilizes a set of components called Updaters to handle the fetching and parsing of data from various vulnerability databases. These Updaters are set up by default to pull vulnerability data directly from the internet and work out of the box. For customers in disconnected environments without direct access to the internet this poses a problem. Clair supports these environments through the ability to work with different types of update workflows that take into account network isolation. Using the clairctl command line utility, any process can easily fetch Updater data from the internet via an open host, securely transfer the data to an isolated host, and then import the Updater data on the isolated host into Clair itself.

The steps are as follows.

  1. First ensure that your Clair configuration has disabled automated Updaters from running.

    config.yaml

    matcher:
  disable_updaters: true

  2. Export out the latest Updater data to a local archive. This requires the clairctl tool which can be run directly as a binary, or via the Clair container image. Assume your Clair configuration is in /etc/clairv4/config/config.yaml, to run via the container image: 

    $ podman run -it --rm -v /etc/clairv4/config:/cfg:Z -v $(pwd):/updaters:Z --entrypoint /bin/clairctl registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8:v3.4.7 export-updaters --config /cfg/config.yaml /updaters/updaters.gz

    Note that you need to explicitly reference the Clair configuration. This will create the Updater archive in /etc/clairv4/updaters/updaters.gz. If you want to ensure the archive was created without any errors from the source databases, you can supply the --strict flag to clairctl. The archive file should be copied over to a volume that is accessible from the disconnected host running Clair. From the disconnected host, use the same procedure now to import the archive into Clair. 

    $ podman run -it --rm -v /etc/clairv4/config:/cfg:Z -v $(pwd):/updaters:Z --entrypoint /bin/clairctl registry.redhat.io/quay/clair-rhel8:v3.4.7 import-updaters --config /cfg/config.yaml /updaters/updaters.gz

6.7. Additional Information
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For detailed documentation on the internals of Clair, including how the microservices are structured, please see the Upstream Clair and ClairCore documentation.

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