Read 2026-10-22
anchore/grype: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in anchore/grype's code and history at e196e95: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | adequate |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | adequate |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
.gitmodules:1: 1 submodule(s) this survey does not read: test/quality/vulnerability-match-labels
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
adequategrype/db/v6/models.go is 1,029 lines, 10× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 100 lines. 1 file exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,029. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
grype/db/v6/models.go:1 — 1,029 lines (10× median) |
1 base image floats: no version, or `latest`
adequate1 of 2 `FROM` lines in product Dockerfiles name an image without a version, or with `latest`. Each build pulls whatever the registry serves that day, so the image that ships can change without a commit, and last month's build cannot be reproduced. Pin a version, or a digest.
Dockerfile:1 — base image without a version |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequate7% of recent commits change more than 2,000 lines
adequate25 of 354 commits in the last 24 months changed over 2,000 lines of code, not counting reformatting, renames, vendored or generated code. A change that size is rarely reviewed line by line. Ask how they were reviewed, and what made them that large.
| 25 commits over 2,000 lines |
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongNo finding.
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate1 Dockerfile runs the application as root
adequateNo USER instruction switches away from root, so the process runs with full privileges inside the container. It is a one-line fix and an ordinary expectation, which is why its absence is worth asking about: it usually says more about whether anyone has reviewed the deployment than about this container specifically.
Dockerfile — runs as root |
1 locked dependency has published vulnerabilities, 1 high or critical in what ships
adequate1 of 356 locked dependencies match 2 published advisories in OSV, 1 of them rated high or critical. A lockfile says which version is installed, not whether the flawed code is reachable from this product, so each needs a look. Most are fixed by an upgrade, and the advisory names the version.
go.mod — github.com/docker/docker v28.5.2+incompatible: GO-2026-4887 (high) |
1 advisory against this project in the last 24 months, 1 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2025-11-24. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. None of them affects the surveyed version.
| 2025-11-24: GHSA-6gxw-85q2-q646 (high), fixed in 0.104.1: Grype has a credential disclosure vulnerability in its JSON output |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 5 of 16 checks could reach a conclusion here; the rest do not apply to this repository or could not read it.
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on anchore/grype: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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