Image Overview: falco-no-driver-fips

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A minimal, wolfi-based image for falco-no-driver. This streamlined variant of Falco designed for real-time security monitoring on Linux, replaces the traditional kernel module with eBPF technology, thus enhancing portability in containerized environments.

Download this Image

The image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/chainguard-private/falco-no-driver-fips:latest

How does falco-no-driver differ over falco?

The primary distinction between falco, and falco-no-driver (i.e this image), lies in their approach to monitoring system calls.

Falco requires a kernel-specific module to hook into the system an monitor system calls.

In contrast, falco-no-driver does not depend on a kernel-specific module, instead leveraging eBPF (modern-bpf driver). This eliminates the need for loading sepatate kernel modules and makes the image more portable, between environments.

When we talk about falco-no-driver, this means no kernel drivers. falco-no-driver is bundled with the modern-bpf driver itself. This can be confusing and is worth clarifying.

Disclaimer: falco doesn’t run on macOS!

If you are intending on testing this image locally, note that falco does not run on macOS. If you attempt to run the image it will fail to launch. See the following falco documentation, where they recommend setting up a linux VM.

Note: You can launch the image on mac by passing in the --nodriver argument instead of --modern-bpf, but other than running the service, it’ll not collect anything, so shouldn’t be used in place of a linux environment for testing.

Running falco-no-driver

Please refer to the upstream documentation for instructions on how to configure and run falco-no-driver. The below examples are intended as demonstrating how to substitute with the chainguard image, and are not comprehensive.

Docker

docker run --rm -i -t \
    --privileged \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/host/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
    cgr.dev/chainguard/falco:latest falco --modern-bpf

Helm chart

The deployment of Falco in a Kubernetes cluster is managed through a Helm chart. Documentation on this helm chart is available here

To install falco-no-driver image supporting modern bpf probe,

    helm repo add falcosecurity https://falcosecurity.github.io/charts
    helm repo update

    helm install falco \
    --namespace falco --create-namespace  \
    --set image.registry=cgr.dev \
    --set image.repository=chainguard/falco-no-driver \
    --set image.tag=latest \
    --set driver.kind=modern-bpf \
    --set falcoctl.image.registry=cgr.dev \
    --set falcoctl.image.repository=chainguard/falcoctl \
    --set falcoctl.image.tag=latest \
    --wait falcosecurity/falco