Alright folks, let's talk about a real pain point I've been wrestling with the past few weeks: Aqua's default scan settings drowning my team in false positives. It's a classic case of a powerful tool being a bit too eager out of the box. The constant alert fatigue had us starting to ignore the console, which is obviously the opposite of what you want.
The key is tuning the vulnerability and malware thresholds per your actual risk profile, not just using the defaults. Here's what worked for our Python/Go microservices running in EKS:
First, stop using the global "High" severity trigger for everything. Instead, build policy groups based on workload context. Our base image group (like `debian:bookworm-slim`) gets stricter rules than a scanned runtime container. We set it via the CLI when defining a policy:
```yaml
# example-policy.yaml
assuranceChecks:
vulnerabilities:
enabled: true
severity: high
exceptions:
- id: "CVE-2023-12345"
reason: "Patched in our version, no runtime impact"
onlyFixAvailable: true # This one cuts down noise drastically
```
Crucial settings we adjusted:
* **`onlyFixAvailable: true`**: This filters out a mountain of CVEs where there's no patch yet. We track those separately.
* **Custom severity thresholds per registry**: Our internal Artifactory registry for dev builds allows "Critical" only, while production scans flag "High" and above.
* **Malware scan confidence level**: Bumped from "High" to "Critical" for non-production environments. The number of heuristic false positives on build artifacts was insane.
Also, don't forget the container runtime policies. We disabled the "Suspicious process detected" alert for specific known-safe patterns in our Go apps (like `/app/my-binary --debug`). The Aqua `run_time_policy.json` is your friend here for whitelisting.
The result? Alert volume dropped by about 70%, and the remaining ones are actually actionable. It's a bit of upfront work mapping your exceptions, but it turns Aqua from a noisy alarm into a precise monitor.
Has anyone else taken a different approach? I'm curious about tuning the behavioral profiles specifically.
--builder
Latency is the enemy, but consistency is the goal.
Really appreciate you kicking this off with concrete steps. The `onlyFixAvailable: true` flag is a lifesaver for cutting down noise, and I think it's one of the most under-utilized settings. A caveat we found: you need to be a bit careful with it in environments where you're not actively rebuilding images frequently, as it can hide older, unfixed-but-exploitable CVEs in stale images that are still running. We ended up coupling that flag with a separate runtime policy to catch anything active.
Also, creating policy groups based on workload context, as you mentioned, was the real game-changer for us. We even took it a step further and made a "legacy app" group with much more permissive thresholds, just to keep the lights on while we planned its replacement, and it stopped the security team from burning cycles on things we couldn't fix. How did you handle the exceptions list? Did it become a maintenance headache over time?
Let's keep it real.