Over 30% of Official Images in Docker Hub Contain High Priority Security Vulnerabilities

Docker Hub is a central repository for Docker developers to pull and push container images. We performed a detailed study on Docker Hub images to understand how vulnerable they are to security threats. Surprisingly, we found that more than 30% ofofficial repositories contain images that are highly susceptible to a variety of security attacks (e.g., Shellshock, Heartbleed, Poodle, etc.). For general images – images pushed by docker users, but not explicitly verified by any authority – this number jumps up to ~40% with a sampling error bound of 3%.