In October 2016 Anchore announced the first release of our commercial product, built on top of our open source container analysis engine. The focus of the open source project and the commercial offering is to deliver tools that perform deep analysis on container images and allow organizations to define policies that govern the deployment of their containers, ensuring that only containers which comply with the organization’s security policy or operational best practices are deployed.

At the same time we also released the Anchore Navigator which provided a free service to allow users to discover and analyze images on public container registries. At launch the Navigator included in-depth analysis on all official repositories on DockerHub and 50 of the most popular repositories. Then early in December we updated the Navigator to add support for basic analysis of all public images on DockerHub allowing users to view basic information such as the image size, layer information, image ID, Digest and creation date.

Today we are announcing a new release of the Navigator that adds a number of powerful new features to this free SaaS service.

Submit Images for Analysis

The first new feature adds the ability for users submit any public tagged image to Anchore for analysis.

At the top of the preview page for an image there is a button to submit the image for analysis.

Once submitted this TAG is added to Anchore’s catalog and will be queued up to be downloaded and analyzed. After the first analysis, Anchore will poll the registry for changes and will download new versions of the TAG for analysis whenever the TAG is updated.

Subscriptions

Another powerful new feature is Subscriptions. Users can subscribe to a TAG and will be notified when the TAG is updated. For example if you use ubuntu:latest as the base image for your containers then when the Ubuntu community push a new ubuntu:latest image to the registry you will receive a notification email from Anchore. Webhook notifications will be added in an upcoming release.

Images can be marked as “favorites” to allow users to quickly access these images.

Organizing Images

A new option has been added on the menu bar for “My Images”

Within the ‘My Images’ page users can view their favorite and subscribed images and quickly see the status of these images – for example to see when an image was last updated.

Ruby Gems Support

In addition to operating system packages, all files and Node.JS NPMs the Navigator now allows you to see a detailed list of all Ruby GEMs installed installed in the image, showing details of the packages, including version, license, location and Origin.

Support for Alpine Linux

Anchore Navigator now supports CVE scanning of Alpine Linux images, incorporating security feeds from the Alpine Projects Vulnerabilities database and the National Vulnerabilities Database.

Registry Support

The Navigator has been built to support multiple registries both public and private registries and to analyze images in Docker’s native format and the upcoming Open Containers Initiative (OCI) Image Format. Over the coming months more registries including private ISV registries will be included within the Navigator’s catalog.

There are more interesting features in development including support for WebHook and Slack notifications, support for deeper analysis of Python libraries and Java Archives along with the ability to analyze private images and define custom policies and whitelists in the commercial Navigator offering.

If you have any questions about the Navigator you can sign up to access Anchore’s community Slack Channel: https://anchore-community.slack.com/messages or get started for free today by clicking the button below.