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Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Hardened Images. This no-cost catalog of trusted micro-sized components is designed to provide a resilient foundation for organizations pursuing Zero-CVE strategies. By providing a streamlined, security-focused starting point, Red Hat helps customers accelerate the development and deployment of cloud-native applications across any environment, from on-premises datacenters to public clouds.
Red Hat Hardened Images is a no-cost catalog of minimal, distroless container images with pre-hardened configurations.
Images contain only specific files required for application to run, removing unnecessary software that creates security noise.
Distroless architecture strips away command-line shells, package managers, and other unnecessary tools to reduce attack entry points.
Built-in SBOMs provided in industry-standard formats for supply chain transparency.
Supports FIPS compliance and regulatory requirements with pre-validated images.
Images can be accessed via the catalog at no cost.
“Modern infrastructure requires a balance between versatility and precision,” said Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat. “With Red Hat Hardened Images, we're providing a highly refined starting point for organizations that need to minimize their footprint without sacrificing the trust of the supply chain. Our goal is to cut through the security noise and give developers a foundation where they can build and scale without having to patch or manage software that their applications do not actually need.”
Security teams are often overwhelmed by a constant stream of security alerts triggered by software that isn't even necessary for the application to run. Red Hat Hardened Images removes the unnecessary software that can increase the risk of attack and creates this security noise. This minimalist approach provides a purpose-built path toward a Zero-CVE environment.
High-fidelity security signals that remove non-essential software components so teams can focus on the vulnerabilities that actually impact their application.
Streamlined CVE triage between developers and security by providing a verified and cleaner starting point for software builds.
Standardized security profiles that apply pre-set configurations during the image creation process to support strict security certifications.
Software supply chain trust with built-in Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) provided in industry-standard formats for greater transparency.
“Container base images are a concentrated point of software supply chain risk, and the vulnerabilities inherited from them often land on developers who have no direct path to remediate them,” said Katie Norton, research manager, IDC. “Red Hat Hardened Images is designed to provide a trusted, verifiable foundation for containerized workloads, intended to help teams meet compliance requirements while maintaining multi-cloud portability. This approach can help enterprises establish a secure default posture without sacrificing flexibility.”
Red Hat Hardened Images are engineered to improve the security posture of modern applications without sacrificing portability. Core capabilities include:
Distroless architecture strips away command-line shells, package managers and other unnecessary tools to significantly reduce potential entry points for attackers.
Trusted application dependencies allow users to pull hardened base images such as Python through Red Hat Trusted Libraries and populate them with verified, pre-built language packages to maintain a chain of trust from the base image through the application dependencies.
Automated remediations where Red Hat tracks upstream sources to provide swift fixes for newly discovered security vulnerabilities so that the catalog remains current.
Multi-cloud portability helps prevent vendor lock-in by providing a consistent operational experience across public clouds and on-premises infrastructure.
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges.
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