Meeting the Zero-CVE Mandate: How Chainguard Helps Businesses Ship Secure Software That Customers Trust

Modern companies are facing a new reality: your customers don’t just want your digital product to be feature-rich. They expect it to be verifiably secure, fully transparent, and ready to pass their own security reviews before it ever goes into production. These demands are especially acute for deployments within a customer’s boundary (self-hosted or public cloud), packaged agents, and software embedded in regulated customer environments. 

Maintaining a high degree of security in these environments and use cases presents both a carrot and a stick for engineering, compliance, and GTM teams. Shipping secure-by-default, transparent software can serve as a crucial differentiator and trust driver across large enterprise customers, speeding procurement processes and assuaging internal risk concerns. For startups and mid-sized businesses, a strong software supply chain security approach makes it clear an offering is enterprise-ready. Conversely, if you can’t prove what’s inside your software and prove that it’s free of known vulnerabilities, you risk losing deals, delaying procurement, or jeopardizing renewals.

The New Baseline: Zero-CVE, Transparent Software

In the past, a simple vulnerability disclosure policy and a patch window were enough to satisfy most customer security teams. That’s no longer the case.

Today, more security and compliance teams are imposing requirements like:

• Zero known CVEs at time of delivery

• Verifiable SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials)

• Provenance attestations proving how and when software was built

• Compatibility with internal security tooling

This shift isn’t hypothetical. According to Sonatype, 60% of businesses require an SBOM as part of their procurement process, while Gartner found that software security was the top factor for organizations when selecting a product, second only to price.

That expectation of strong security practices and clear provenance can become challenging in a software world reliant on open source artifacts, which make up over 70% of a given application’s code base.

For businesses building modern, cloud-native applications that serve highly regulated industries or have an on-premise agent or packaged, embedded software, there are a number of challenges:

• Open source dependencies have murky provenance. Many container images are built from community-provided bases without cryptographic attestations.

• Traditional base images come with a constant stream of new CVEs. Even if you try to patch manually, vulnerabilities accumulate faster than you can fix them.

• Security scanners often struggle to detect everything in nonstandard images. If your images can’t be scanned by your customer’s tools, your deal can stall.

• Customer security requirements are different. Trying to juggle various customer requirements can be challenging and lead to re-work.

Even if a developer team tries to remediate manually, the costs and workload can be staggering. Chainguard’s own analysis based on customer DIY estimations shows it can cost as much as $74,000 to do the initial CVE remediation for a given image, with ongoing CVE maintenance costing as much as $91,000 annually. Additionally, security and platform teams can end up handling reactive customer escalations for vulnerabilities found in images, leading to hours of unplanned work.

How Chainguard Makes Zero-CVE, Verifiably Secure Software Achievable

Chainguard was purpose-built to help organizations with digital products deliver secure-by-default containers images that satisfy even the most stringent customer requirements:

Zero-CVE Baseline Containers

Chainguard maintains the industry’s most extensive set of trusted container images with zero known vulnerabilities at release. Container images are rebuilt daily to maintain this posture so you can ship confidently without relying on DIY backporting or emergency patching.

This doesn’t stop at base images. It extends to Helm Charts and app images as well, so immediate CVE reductions are possible with near drop-in replacement images. The outcome of a zero-CVE baseline means a Platform or AppDev team will never be left trying to juggle multiple security baselines: full remediation meets every expectation.

Verifiable Provenance and SBOMs

Every Chainguard container image includes signed attestations proving what was built, when, and by whom. Detailed SBOMs are published alongside every release, making it easy to pass customer audits and satisfy procurement requirements out of the box.

Broad Compatibility

Chainguard container images are tested against the most common third-party scanners, including Aqua, Crowdstrike, Grype, Orca, Prisma, Trivy, Wiz and others, so your customers can validate them using their preferred tools without friction.

Chainguard container images work across customer environments, whether that be major cloud service providers or local machines to enable organizations to adopt and deploy Chainguard container images for every stage of their SDLC process.

Custom Assembly for Bespoke Images

Need a specialized base? Custom Assembly is an included feature of Chainguard Containers, enabling users to create customized container images with extra packages added. This enables customers to reduce their risk exposure by creating container images that are tailored to their internal organization and application requirements while still preserving the same zero-CVE guarantees, provenance, and scannability.

Chainguard customer GitGuardian dealt with customer pressures around delivering zero-CVE images, and turned to Chainguard to solve the problem. The benefits were immediately clear as GitGuardian witnessed a drastic reduction in CVEs eliminating them by 100%. They went from facing numerous critical and high vulnerabilities to achieving a state where such vulnerabilities were literally nonexistent, in addition to a 33% reduction in image size.

"Security is in the DNA of GitGuardian,” said Romain Jouhannet, Sr. Product Manager. “And Chainguard really made sense when we started to look at how to streamline and make sure we don't ship our software with any vulnerabilities because that is a really big part of our story."

Turning Security Into a Competitive Advantage

When you start with Chainguard Containers, you don’t just check a box. You can accelerate procurement cycles by meeting customer requirements upfront, reduce time and cost spent on remediation and audits, and strengthen your brand with transparent, verifiable security.

In an environment where trust is the ultimate differentiator, this is how you stand out.

Ready to see how Chainguard can help you deliver secure-by-default software that customers trust? Get in touch with our team to learn more.