cortex-fips

What is Cortex FIPS?

The Cortex image packages Cortex, a CNCF project that provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus metrics. Cortex receives metrics through Prometheus remote write and serves PromQL queries, and it can run as a single binary or as separate microservices such as distributor, ingester, querier, query-frontend, compactor, and store-gateway. It stores blocks in object storage such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage and enforces per-tenant limits. It is used by observability and platform teams that need metrics at a scale and retention beyond a single Prometheus server.

The Cortex FIPS image is Echo's FIPS variant of Cortex: the same metrics storage backend, built to run on FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography. It is designed for organizations that sell to or operate for the US government — FedRAMP-authorized services, federal contractors, and regulated industries — where a metrics storage backend that receives and stores metrics from many tenants and serves queries to dashboards and alerting must use cryptographic modules with an active NIST CMVP certificate, not merely FIPS-enabled libraries.

What is Echo's Cortex FIPS image?

Echo's Cortex FIPS image is a hardened, FIPS-validated build of Cortex on Echo's hardened base. Because Cortex is written in Go, its cryptography is handled by a CMVP-validated Go crypto module such as BoringCrypto rather than by OpenSSL; Echo supports OpenSSL, BoringCrypto, and Bouncy Castle across its FIPS images. Echo images are designed to be a drop-in replacement: swap the image reference in your Dockerfile or deployment manifest for the cortex-fips image and CVEs go to zero without disrupting your tenant limits, object storage configuration, ring settings, and remote write endpoints. Every image is tested across clouds, image use cases, and deployment targets. Echo ships every image in two variants:

• Distroless variant — optimized for runtime use, with the smallest possible attack surface
• Default variant — includes essential build tools, package managers, and shells for teams that need operational access

For production Cortex deployments, the distroless variant keeps all runtime operations — remote write ingestion, block storage, PromQL queries, compaction, and ring membership — fully intact while minimizing exposure; the default variant suits observability and platform teams that need shell access for debugging component health, inspecting rings, or testing queries.

What is the difference between Echo's Cortex FIPS image and the public Cortex image?

Public Cortex images ship on general-purpose bases whose cryptographic libraries have not been validated under FIPS 140-3, and FIPS-enabled is not the same as FIPS-validated — auditors for FedRAMP and other federal frameworks flag the gap. Those bases also include OS-level tooling convenient for development but which contribute CVEs that accumulate on a metrics storage backend used in production. Cortex images run continuously with access to tenant metrics data, object storage credentials, and TLS keys. OS-level CVEs in the base image — particularly in libraries such as openssl, zlib, and libc, along with the Go runtime dependencies — create exploitable paths that bypass application-layer controls entirely, allowing attackers to move from a network-reachable service to host-level access. For teams running Cortex across many environments, the image is also a steady source of scanner noise in the CI pipeline — every package in the base becomes a finding your security team must triage, even when none of it is reachable from the service. Echo's FIPS build retains everything Cortex needs for remote write ingestion, block storage, PromQL queries, compaction, and ring membership while routing cryptography through a validated module and removing the packages that don't belong in a production Cortex metrics storage backend. As we covered in our post on how to protect your company from software supply chain attacks, long-running services that hold sensitive data and listen on the network are among the widest attack surfaces in the container stack. Echo commits to a 7-day SLA for critical and high severity vulnerabilities, and 10 days for medium, low, and unknown — with vulnerabilities triaged within 24 hours. Echo FIPS images are STIG-hardened, ship with SBOMs in SPDX and CycloneDX formats and signed provenance, and are recognized by all major scanners and mirrored to all major registries, so they fit into existing pipelines without changing your registry, scanner, or runtime tooling.

FAQ

Can I replace my Cortex image with Echo's Cortex FIPS image?

Yes. Echo's Cortex FIPS image is a drop-in replacement. Update the FROM line in your Dockerfile to the cortex-fips image and your workloads keep running. Prometheus remote write, PromQL queries, tenant limits, object storage backends, and ring configuration all continue to work without changes to your Prometheus servers or dashboards. Because FIPS mode disallows non-approved algorithms, anything that depends on legacy ciphers or hashes such as MD5-based signatures needs to move to approved algorithms.

Is Echo's Cortex FIPS image FIPS-validated?

Yes. Echo's FIPS images use CMVP-validated cryptographic modules, operating in a configuration consistent with the module's FIPS 140-3 security policy. Because Cortex is written in Go, its cryptography is handled by a CMVP-validated Go crypto module such as BoringCrypto rather than by OpenSSL; Echo supports OpenSSL, BoringCrypto, and Bouncy Castle across its FIPS images. That makes the image fit for federal use — unlike FIPS-enabled or FIPS-compliant images whose cryptographic libraries have never been validated. This matters for teams running Cortex inside FedRAMP boundaries, where a metrics storage backend that receives and stores metrics from many tenants and serves queries to dashboards and alerting must meet cryptographic requirements across the full stack. Echo also provides a FIPS runtime tester that executes approved and unapproved algorithms to show how the image behaves at runtime.

What is Echo's vulnerability management SLA on the Cortex FIPS image?

Echo commits to a 7-day SLA for critical and high severity vulnerabilities, and 10 days for medium, low, and unknown — with vulnerabilities triaged within 24 hours. Patches are mirrored automatically into your private registry so you're always running a clean version — critical for a long-running service that holds tenant metrics data, object storage credentials, and TLS keys and is reachable over the network.

Is Echo's Cortex FIPS image distroless?

Echo ships every image in two variants: a distroless variant optimized for runtime use, and a default variant that includes essential build tools, package managers, and shells. For production Cortex deployments, the distroless variant is the leaner, more secure choice; for observability and platform teams that need shell access for debugging component health, inspecting rings, or testing queries, the default variant is the right fit.

How does Echo achieve such a drastic CVE reduction in Cortex?

Echo's Cortex FIPS image is built from source with only the absolute essentials needed to run the Cortex metrics storage backend, which significantly shrinks the attack surface. Echo also patches aggressively over time, with backports available so you can stay on the Cortex version your applications and their dependencies are certified against — avoiding a disruptive upgrade forced purely by OS-level vulnerabilities in the base image rather than by your own requirements.

Will Echo's Cortex FIPS image help us achieve FedRAMP?

Yes. The hard parts of FedRAMP — managing vulnerabilities, applying fixes, and using FIPS-validated cryptography — are baked into Echo images, including STIG-hardened configuration and ConMon/POA&M-ready reporting. For observability and platform teams running Cortex under an ATO — whether that's centralized multi-tenant metrics, long-term retention for compliance, or a large-scale monitoring platform — Echo's FIPS-validated Cortex image keeps the metrics storage backend layer in-boundary and compliant without requiring custom hardening scripts or manual base image patching between compliance cycles.

‍