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Wolfi turned three as a public project and has become the base for Chainguard container images and much of the industry chasing clean software supply chains. A field-tested review of what it offers against Alpine and Debian slim.
VEX, the Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange, is a structured way for a vendor to state whether a CVE listed in an SBOM actually affects a product. Log4Shell in December 2021 showed why it exists: countless Java applications carried that critical CVE while never loading the vulnerable class. VEX marks which vulnerabilities are not exploitable, so scanner noise becomes signal.
SLSA v1.0 splits software supply-chain security into three tracks (Build, Source, and Dependencies), of which only Build is stabilized, with three levels: L1, L2, and L3. If you build in GitHub Actions, reaching L2 with Sigstore-signed provenance takes a few hours and is the starting point I recommend to any team.
Chainguard Images are minimal Docker containers from the company behind Sigstore, with zero known CVEs, Cosign-signed SBOMs and daily rebuilds on top of Wolfi, its own glibc-based distribution. They pay off over official images when strict compliance, supply chain audits or sensitive production workloads are at stake.
Sigstore has become the standard signing layer for OCI artefacts. GHCR is the best-integrated registry; Harbor 2.5+ and Quay offer native support; AWS ECR pushes its own KMS scheme. Verification earns its keep at three points: the cluster admission controller, the GitOps layer, and the CI/CD pipeline. The public Rekor has rate limits that force self-hosting past a certain build volume.
Signing images and artifacts with Sigstore has stopped being a rare experiment: projects like Kubernetes already use it. The keyless model in cosign, Fulcio, and Rekor removes private-key management, but it only protects you if deployment verifies who signed, not just whether a signature exists.
SLSA v1.0, published in April 2023, defines four maturity levels for securing the software supply chain, from basic provenance to isolated builds. Level 3 requires every build to run in an ephemeral, stateless environment, eliminating attacks like build contamination and insider threat, and is achievable with GitHub Actions and OIDC signing via Sigstore.
In 2023, software supply chains became attackers' favourite target: MOVEit exposed data from hundreds of organisations through a zero-day flaw, 3CX shipped a trojanised installer to millions of users, and npm and PyPI kept receiving malicious typosquatted packages. The practical defence combines SBOM, artefact signing with Sigstore, SLSA maturity levels, and continuous dependency scanning.
