Which tool should you use for validating and enforcing security policies on container images?

Binary Authorization in GKE clusters is a powerful tool specifically designed to validate and enforce security policies on container images. It acts as a deployment safety mechanism that ensures only trusted container images are deployed to your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. By defining policies that require certain criteria to be met—such as having undergone security scans, being signed by trusted authorities, or meeting compliance standards—Binary Authorization helps prevent vulnerabilities introduced by malicious or unverified images.

The use of Binary Authorization offers a flexible yet robust approach to maintaining a secure deployment process within Kubernetes, as it integrates seamlessly with the CI/CD pipelines. This tool effectively enhances the security posture of your applications running in GKE by ensuring that only those images that have passed predefined security checks are allowed to be deployed.

Other choices, while important in their own capacities, do not specifically enforce security policies during the deployment phase of container images. For instance, the Cloud Build service account permissions focus more on access control rather than on validation of images themselves. Kritis, which provides image scanning and compliance checks, is relevant to image security but does not enforce deployment policies directly. Meanwhile, Cloud Security Command Center is a broader security management tool designed for monitoring and managing security across Google Cloud resources rather than specifically validating container images