In our CI/CD pipelines, we've integrated Sysdig's vulnerability scanning at multiple stages—during the container build in Jenkins and again in the registry via GitHub Actions. While the coverage is excellent, the reports are often dominated by findings from base images or common libraries that pose no realistic threat in our runtime context (e.g., vulnerabilities in package managers on read-only layers, or CVEs marked as 'negligible' with no network exposure).
This creates significant noise, making it difficult for developers to prioritize genuine, actionable risks. We've attempted to whitelist specific CVEs, but maintaining that list is becoming untenable.
Has anyone established a reproducible method or policy for filtering these 'benign' vulnerabilities from final compliance or deployment-blocking reports? I'm particularly interested in approaches that integrate with pipeline-as-code.
Our current Jenkinsfile snippet for the scan stage looks like this:
```groovy
stage('Vulnerability Scan') {
steps {
sh '''sysdig-cli evaluate-image
--policy "Default"
--output-file scan-report.json
${IMAGE_TAG}
'''
}
post {
always {
archiveArtifacts 'scan-report.json'
}
}
}
```
I am considering:
* **Policy customizations** in Sysdig Secure to suppress vulnerabilities based on specific package names or severities below a threshold.
* **Post-processing the JSON report** with a script (jq, perhaps) to exclude vulnerabilities that meet certain 'noise' criteria before the report is evaluated for pipeline failure.
* **Implementing a two-stage review:** an initial 'permissive' policy for development branches and a strict one for release candidates.
What has proven effective in your environments? Are there pitfalls in being overly aggressive with suppression, such as missing a truly critical finding masked by a common package?
--crusader
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.
Yeah, dealing with noisy vulnerability scans is a huge pain, and manual whitelists are a nightmare to maintain. I've wrestled with this exact problem using Sysdig and Trivy.
One approach that worked for us was moving the filtering logic earlier in the pipeline, using the scanner's own policy capabilities instead of just whitelisting CVEs. For Sysdig, you can author custom policy rules that filter based on severity, package type, and even layer. For example, you could write a rule that automatically ignores `CRITICAL` findings if they're in a read-only base image layer with no network exposure path.
We ended up creating a separate, stricter policy for our final compliance/release gate that inherits from the default but adds these context-aware suppressions. That way, developers still see the full report during the build stage, but the blocking report is cleaner.
Also, your Jenkinsfile snippet is cut off, but if you're outputting JSON, you could add a post-processing step with `jq` to filter out entries where `"severity"` is `"NEGLIGIBLE"` or the package is in a predefined list of "noise" packages (like `apt`). It's a bit hacky but keeps the filtering in code.
Have you looked at using the `--policy-bundle` flag to version-control your filter policies alongside your pipeline code?
Integration Ian
Whitelisting CVEs is a dead end, it just turns into full-time maintenance. Instead of filtering after the scan, you should adjust your scan policy to exclude specific *classes* of findings from the start.
Since you're using the CLI, you can reference a custom policy file that defines these filters. We wrote one that ignores all findings in a specified base image layer (like `sha256:.../usr/lib/apt/`), and ignores any 'NEGLIGIBLE' severity if the package isn't in the final runtime command. Saves the team hours of sifting.
Here's a snippet of our policy rule to suppress negligible severity in non-runtime packages:
```
rule: suppress_non_runtime_negligible
desc: ...
scope:
- vulnerability
condition: |
vuln_severity == "NEGLIGIBLE" and not package_name in runtime_packages_list
action: WARN
```
You bake this into your pipeline-as-code by storing the policy YAML in your infra repo and pointing `--policy` at it.