Canonical, the publisher of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on Tuesday that it has made available long-term support (LTS) container images on Docker Hub, promising up to 10 years of security maintenance.
Canonical’s LTS Docker Image Portfolio includes both free and commercial images. Some of these hardened images have a five-year free security maintenance period — the standard security maintenance of the underlying Ubuntu LTS — while customers of Ubuntu Pro are provided access to ten-year Extended Security Maintenance images.
“Guarantees of software supply chain security and integrity are vital to the fast-moving world of cloud-native operations,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical. “As the platform provider for the vast majority of container runtimes, we are responsible for the underlying performance and security of multi-cloud container operations and are glad to extend that service to the application container layer.”
Canonical has promised to fix critical and high-severity vulnerabilities in LTS images within 24 hours.
The announcement comes just weeks after application security company Snyk started providing security scanning capabilities for images pushed to Docker Hub.
“For too long, going cloud native has left enterprises exposed to security vulnerabilities – from sourcing patched images through awareness of vulnerabilities to the maintenance lifecycle,” said Jim Armstrong, product director at Snyk.
“The availability of the LTS Docker Image Portfolio, as well as the recently announced Docker security scanning powered by Snyk directly in Docker Hub, can drive a surge in Kubernetes adoption as companies embrace digital transformation while significantly reducing operating risk in the solution application life-cycle,” he added.
Related: Canonical GitHub Account Hijacked
Related: Less Than Half of Vulnerabilities in Popular Docker Images Pose Risk: Study
