tracee

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for tracee

Linux runtime security and forensics using eBPF

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/tracee:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's Tracee image is comparable to the upstream Tracee image. It keeps the same /tracee layout, the same /tracee/entrypoint.sh entrypoint, and the same four binaries: tracee, tracee-ebpf, tracee-rules, and tracee-operator.

Chainguard Containers usually run as a nonroot user. This image runs as root because Tracee loads eBPF programs and reads host namespaces, which need elevated kernel capabilities.

The binaries, signatures, and templates live under /tracee, matching the upstream image, and /usr/bin carries symlinks to them.

Prerequisites

Tracee loads eBPF programs into the host kernel, so it needs more privilege than a typical workload:

• A privileged container, sharing the host PID and cgroup namespaces.
• The host /etc/os-release bind-mounted at the path named by LIBBPFGO_OSRELEASE_FILE, which defaults to /etc/os-release-host. The entrypoint exits non-zero when this file is missing.
• A Linux kernel with BTF enabled, so Tracee's CO-RE objects load without kernel headers. See the upstream prerequisites.

Getting Started

Run Tracee against the host and stream detections to stdout:

docker run --name tracee --rm \
  --pid=host --cgroupns=host --privileged \
  -v /etc/os-release:/etc/os-release-host:ro \
  -v /var/run:/var/run:ro \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/tracee:latest

Tracee emits JSON events as they are detected. To confirm which events and signatures the image can report, list them:

docker run --rm --entrypoint /tracee/tracee \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/tracee:latest list

On Kubernetes, deploy with the upstream chart, which runs Tracee as a privileged DaemonSet and mounts the host os-release for you:

helm repo add aqua https://aquasecurity.github.io/helm-charts
helm install tracee aqua/tracee \
  --namespace tracee-system --create-namespace \
  --set image.repository=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/tracee \
  --set image.tag=latest

Configuration

By default the chart applies a policy that traces signature events such as stdio_over_socket and k8s_api_connection rather than raw syscalls. To watch specific syscalls instead, pass them explicitly. This example reports every process execution on the host, which is a useful starting point for understanding what Tracee sees before narrowing the scope:

docker run --name tracee --rm \
  --pid=host --cgroupns=host --privileged \
  -v /etc/os-release:/etc/os-release-host:ro \
  -v /var/run:/var/run:ro \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/tracee:latest \
  --events execve --output=json

Tracing every execve on a busy host produces a high event rate, so scope production deployments with a policy that selects only the events you intend to act on.

Documentation and Resources

• Tracee documentation
• Tracee source
• Chainguard Academy

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.