Integrate your Container Image Registries into Mend Container

Overview

The Mend container image registry scanning solution offers a seamless integration to Container Image registries on demand. It’s designed to scan container images at scale, directly from image registries, and identify security vulnerabilities in them.

Through our container image registry scanning, we empower you and your organization to proactively identify threats and ensure that you have a comprehensive view of your security posture to carry out the necessary remediations to protect your applications.

Use cases for integrating your private container image registries with Mend

The registry integrations can be utilized in the following ways:

You, a DevOps Engineer, are responsible for implementing tools that scan container images stored in your organization's registry for known vulnerabilities. You are looking for a tool that automates the scan process to reduce the workload of manual reviews.
You, an AppSec Manager, are tasked with ensuring that no container images with known vulnerabilities are deployed in the organization's production environment from your development team. You want a visual representation of the overall state of your registries.
You, a Security Champion, are in charge of analyzing image registry scan findings. You want a tool that will help you in providing feedback to your development teams on what risks need to be addressed first.

Mend’s Answer: By integrating Mend with your organization's private image registry, you provide security to your organization by automatically bulk-scanning images in your registries. This enables your organization to maintain an up-to-date view of the security posture of your container images, ensuring that potential vulnerabilities are detected, triaged, and addressed promptly.

Getting it done

Configure the private registry integration in the Mend Platform

While logged into the Mend Platform, click the cogwheel icon at the top right corner of the screen and select ‘Integrations’:

Scroll down to the ‘Registries’ section and click the desired integration:

Fill in the relevant information. The steps are explained more explicitly in the designated article for each integration:

Amazon ECR

Microsoft Azure ACR

Docker Hub (Private Cloud)

Jfrog Artifactory Cloud

Types of registry integrations in the Mend application

We detect and save private and public registry occurrences.

Public registries will be tagged as Public/Manual in the Registry Access column to indicate that we detected a public registry.
Private registries will be tagged as Private, these are registries created from the integration page.
System-managed registries will be tagged as such, System-managed, and indicate registries found automatically as part of a K8s scan.

Trigger a private registry scan

Note: Registry scans are set by default to scan the 10 most recent tags of each detected repository, to avoid storing unnecessary and outdated data in your Mend organization.
The latest tag will be scanned last to reflect the up-to-date version of each repository.

Once a tag has been scanned, it won’t be scanned again unless its push date to the registry was changed (not likely, not recommended).

Pull settings will be added soon to control which repositories and tags will be scanned.

The registry integration scan can be started by one of the following:

A scan will start automatically when the private registry is initially added via the Integrations dashboard.
Still in the Integrations screen, under Settings → My Integrations (1) select the relevant private registry or registries (2) and click on the Scan Now button to initiate a scan.

Alternatively, you can click the Scan Now button in the options menu at the far edge of the screen (applicable to a single registry at a time)

Scan Scheduling

The Scan Interval column provides scheduling details for your scans. Hovering over the Scan Interval value will spawn a tooltip that displays the Scan Schedule and the time of the next scan.

You can change the schedule at any time by going to the “My Integrations” page, clicking the vertical menu button () and choosing ‘Edit’:

This action will direct you to the ‘Configuration’ step of the integration, where you can change the scheduling configuration:

Click ‘Update’ to save the changes:

Review your private registry integration results

Visit the Review the Container Image Scan Findings within your Organization page for the documentation on reviewing container image scan results in the Mend Platform.

Reference

Supported registries

We support the following platforms for the Mend private registry integration:

Amazon ECR
Microsoft Azure Container Registry (ACR)
DockerHub (PrivateCloud)
JFrog Artifactory Cloud

Note: Scanning public registries with the Mend registry integration is not supported. Instead, you can scan individual images from Docker API-supported public registries with the Mend CLI using the mend image command.

Mend private image registry integration service user

When you configure and activate any of our private registry integrations for the first time, a service user is automatically created within the integrated Mend organization.

The service user will have a name similar to “<cn-registry-service-unique_string>”. This service user is automatically added to the admins Group (with organization administrator permissions) and is required for the integration to function properly.

You can view this service user via the Administration --> Users page.