In 2025, containers are everywhere, powering CI/CD pipelines, supporting cloud-native development, and driving faster software delivery. Yet for many DevOps and security teams, container adoption has come with a familiar problem: a flood of CVEs.
According to industry reports, over 90% of organizations now use or are evaluating containers in their production environments. But many of those containers are built on public base images that contain outdated dependencies, misconfigurations, and unpatched CVEs. The result? Teams spend more time reacting to scanner alerts than building software.
Why Container Security Matters
Container security is a combination of minimization and hardening, with the end goal being a reduced attack surface. The concept is simple: if it’s not there, there can be no exploitation. However, manually stripping back images, auditing dependencies, and applying secure defaults quickly becomes complex at scale.
That’s where ActiveState Secure Containers redefine best practices. Instead of merely patching vulnerabilities as they appear, ActiveState employs a rigorous four-step assembly process to secure containers from the ground up:
Securing the Base: Instead of relying on bloated general-purpose Linux distributions, ActiveState uses a custom “distroless” base image. This foundation contains only the essential runtime dependencies, deliberately excluding standard components like package managers, shells, and debugging tools that often serve as attack vectors.
Building from Source: ActiveState takes container hardening a step further by building every component from source code. This eliminates the blind trust in third-party binaries and ensures each dependency is verified and attested.
Configuration & Assembly: Images are further optimized by stripping unnecessary files, documentation, and debug symbols to ensure the smallest and most secure footprint possible.
Testing & Distribution: Before publication, every image is put through an automated pipeline to perform a variety of checks and functions. This includes SCA scanning for remaining vulnerabilities, image size, cryptographic signing for verification, and the generation of a detailed build-time SBOM to ensure audit readiness and compliance.
Automation That Scales Security
Hardening is only half the battle; maintenance is the other. ActiveState’s images are rebuilt nightly and bound by strict remediation SLAs:
- 5 business days for critical CVEs
- 10 days for highs
- 30 days for all others
That means DevSecOps teams can integrate hardened containers into their CI/CD pipelines and trust that what they deploy remains vulnerability-free without manual patching or dependency guesswork.
The Bottom Line
Container security isn’t a one-time task; it’s a continuous discipline. ActiveState helps teams transition from reactive patching to proactive prevention, securing containers from the ground up.
Why Choose ActiveState?
For overworked DevSecOps teams, ActiveState provides a fully automated security layer as a managed service. We alleviate the immense overhead of building, maintaining, and certifying containers by managing the entire process—from source-built components (over 40 million) to guaranteed rapid remediation SLAs. For businesses in regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare, this proactive security is a critical risk mitigation strategy that can save hundreds of millions of dollars in regulatory fines and post-breach remediation costs.
Download the complete ActiveState Container Hardening Guide to learn how to integrate these best practices into your workflow.
