Clair is a container vulnerability scanner that performs static analysis of container images to identify known security vulnerabilities. It functions as an analyzer for OCI and Docker images, indexing their contents to detect security risks and outdated packages without requiring the containers to be running.
The tool identifies vulnerabilities by matching indexed container components against security databases to find common vulnerabilities and exposures. This process involves analyzing filesystem layers to track the provenance and versioning of packages across the image hierarchy.
The project provides capabilities for container security auditing and image security analysis, enabling the automation of vulnerability detection within development and deployment pipelines. This includes the extraction of package metadata from image layers to create searchable inventories for security audits.