Executive summary


Public container registries carry inherited vulnerabilities, patchy maintenance, occasional hidden malware, thin build metadata, and a real supply chain attack surface. When those images pass through CI without a gate, the vulnerabilities land in production, where remediation costs jump. Hardened images address the problem at the source rather than at the scanner.

CleanStart images are built minimal, hardened against common misconfigurations, scanned for vulnerabilities and malware, aligned with standards including FIPS, and signed for integrity and provenance, resulting in a near-zero CVE footprint. The solution has two parts. The Repository ships hardened container and VM images that teams can pull directly or mirror into a private registry. The Portal handles subscription management, image catalog browsing, custom image requests by architecture, OS, and application version, signature verification, usage and ROI dashboards, and support.