Executive Summary

Container adoption crossed 75% of organisations in 2025, with over 30 billion image pulls a month from public registries, most from unverified or unmaintained sources. Public images ship with high CVE counts (up to 997 vulnerabilities in a Node.js image on Docker Hub), outdated components, hidden malware, opaque provenance, and no verifiable SBOMs or signatures. As of March 2025, over 51% of Docker Hub images carry critical vulnerabilities, 87% of production images carry critical or high severity findings, and Debian-based official images average around 239 CVEs where OS package updates only clear roughly 6%. Layered on top, package ecosystems add their own exposure: 4.6 million Docker Hub repos with phishing or malware content, 6,790 active tokens or secrets embedded in public artifacts, and GitHub's Advisory Database holding 20,607 reviewed advisories plus 262,857 unreviewed issues across npm, Maven, PyPI, Go, and RubyGems.

CleanStart replaces that base with near zero-CVE hardened images built clean, not patched after the fact. Reported properties include roughly 85% reduction in image size, FIPS, STIG, and SLSA Level 3 alignment, SBOMs in SPDX and CycloneDX, Sigstore signatures, and remediation SLAs of 7 days for Critical and 14 days for High, Medium, and Low CVEs. The Node.js 23.6.0 comparison in the paper is direct: 1.12 GB and 997 to 2,247 vulnerabilities on Docker Hub, 106 MB and 0 on CleanStart. Access runs through the portal or private registry replication, so adoption fits existing CI/CD without workflow changes.