Trusted content is the foundation security-conscious organizations expect all builds to start from. Docker has made that possible for everyone by providing the foundation free. Docker Hardened Images (DHI) are open source under Apache 2.0, with a catalog of 4,000+ minimal images (and growing) built from source and continuously maintained by Docker. The catalog also carries customizable Helm charts and over 65,000 hardened system packages. For most services, adopting DHI is as simple as changing the FROM line.
Teams building on a secure foundation now want the same assurance for the open source their applications install. That open source is a different layer of the supply chain, where thousands of upstream projects are pulled in at build time by pip, npm and Maven, and by coding agents as well.
Docker is committed to one standard for trusted content across everything teams build on. A new partnership with ActiveState, the company that has been securing open source since 1997, extends that standard to the packages themselves. Together, we give teams the same assurance on both layers, from the hardened images Docker maintains to the packages developers and their agents install on them. Once configured, the integration allows developers and AI coding assistants to continue using familiar package managers and development workflows, while approved dependencies are sourced through governed repositories rather than directly from public registries.
A hardened foundation removes a class of security work before code is written
Most applications still start from a large, generic base image, and the cost of that choice keeps growing. A large image increases the attack surface and accumulates stale dependencies, and the CVEs it generates land on developers long after the image was chosen. By removing unnecessary packages, rebuilding components from source and continuously maintaining the image, Docker Hardened Images reduce the vulnerabilities inherited from the container foundation. Images can achieve near-zero known CVEs, which means less remediation work and less scanner noise before application code is introduced. The hardening and patching are handled once in the foundation, for every service that builds on it.
Key takeaways
- When the TeamPCP campaign weaponized a widely trusted security scanner in March, Docker Hardened Images were not affected. DHI’s controlled build pipeline and dependency cooldown periods helped prevent compromised upstream artifacts from entering the image build process during the attack window.
Without trusted content on both layers, your team inherits the risk
Above the base image sit the dependencies an application brings with it. DHI secures the operating system packages and the language runtime that ship in the image. The application’s own libraries are pulled in at build time by its package managers from public registries, where trust is assumed and seldom verified. That layer needs what the image now has, a source that admits only the versions a team has approved and stands behind the fix when one of them needs it. Coding agents now pull those packages too. As Mark Lechner, CISO wrote in April, a compromised dependency pulled by an agent has the same blast radius as a compromised developer machine.
This year’s supply chain incidents have followed one pattern. As Lechner documented, attackers steal developer credentials, use them to poison trusted packages, and the compromised packages steal more credentials. The axios compromise earlier this year put two backdoored versions of a library downloaded 83 million times a week into circulation for about three hours. Most of these attacks burn out within hours. A build that resolves fresh from a public registry, with no lockfile or cooldown in front of it, has nothing between it and a version published an hour ago. The slower failure is the vulnerability that surfaces in one of those libraries months later, when no one outside the team is accountable for the fix. Either way, without trusted content on both layers, the risk lands on your team.
One standard for trusted content, from the image to the packages built on it
Docker Hardened Images are the foundation, and Docker stands behind them. Each image ships with a signed SBOM and SLSA Build Level 3 provenance, with full, unsuppressed CVE visibility. A security team can see what is in the image and how it was built. For teams that need remediation on a predictable clock, DHI adds a 7-day SLA on critical and high CVEs, FIPS and STIG variants, and secure customization on its paid tiers.
While DHI secures the image, ActiveState hardens the open source built on it. ActiveState provides the Curated Catalog, a private, policy-governed repository of open source components that security teams curate and developers and AI coding assistants consume safely. The catalog holds only the packages a team has approved. ActiveState compiles every component from original source code in a SLSA Level 3 environment with full provenance and complete SBOMs, in place of pre-compiled binaries from a public registry. When a fix becomes available upstream, ActiveState rebuilds the component and publishes it to the catalog automatically under SLAs of 5 business days for critical CVEs and 10 for highs.
With DHI and the Curated Catalog together, both layers carry provenance, SBOMs and a remediation SLA from the hardened image to the packages built on it. That gives security teams a consistent evidence trail across the software supply chain. The artifact repository teams already run, Artifactory or Nexus, points at the Curated Catalog as its upstream the way it points at PyPI today. Developers keep the same pip and npm workflow, and coding agents are served the governed version. None of this replaces the pinned digests, cooldown periods and sandboxed agents Lechner recommends. It gives those controls a governed source to point at.
The agentic era demands trusted content at every layer
AI coding agents are changing how quickly organizations create software. They can generate applications, select dependencies and initiate builds at a pace that traditional security review processes were never designed to support. Still, faster development should not mean blindly accepting more supply chain risk. Docker Hardened Images reduce the security burden of maintaining container foundations. ActiveState’s Curated Catalog extends governance and managed vulnerability remediation to the open source libraries those applications depend on. The result is a more consistent approach to software supply chain security, with trusted foundations, governed dependencies, verifiable build evidence and clear remediation responsibilities.
The goal is not to add another security checkpoint that causes friction in your build process. It is to make the secure path the easiest path for developers, platform teams and AI coding agents alike.
Security scales when the defaults are strong and the foundation is maintained by a team accountable for it. In an increasingly agent-driven development environment, the security of what gets built depends heavily on the trustworthiness of what those agents are allowed to consume. Docker now resells the ActiveState Curated Catalog alongside DHI, and ActiveState resells DHI to its customers. The hardened image and the packages built on it are both available through Docker.
