Chainguard Images

Chainguard Images represents a curated suite of hardened, minimal container base images crafted to deliver production-ready runtimes with zero or near-zero known vulnerabilities. Designed to replace standard distributions like Debian, Alpine, or Ubuntu in containerized microservices, each image contains only the absolute bare minimum libraries required to execute targeted programming runtimes such as Node.js, Python, Java, Go, and .NET. By omitting package managers like apk, apt, or yum, along with default shell interpreters, Chainguard Images effectively neutralizes common exploitation paths and drastically reduces CVE noise during automated container scanning. Enterprises rely on the Chainguard Images catalog to fulfill strict regulatory requirements, such as FedRAMP and HIPAA, by receiving daily automated builds with upstream security patches applied within guaranteed vendor service level agreements. Every image distribution is accompanied by full SPDX and CycloneDX software bills of materials (SBOM), SLSA provenance metadata, and cryptographic Sigstore Cosign signatures. The catalog also features FIPS-compliant cryptographic variants for federal workloads, enabling enterprise infrastructure teams to streamline audit compliance, optimize container build speeds, and accelerate cloud migration initiatives without disrupting existing developer workflows.