dragonfly-fips

What is Dragonfly FIPS?

Dragonfly is a CNCF project that provides efficient, stable, and secure peer-to-peer distribution of container images and files. It speeds up image pulls across large clusters and reduces load on registries by letting nodes share content with each other.

The Dragonfly FIPS image is Echo's FIPS variant of Dragonfly: the same image distribution system, 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 an image distribution system that moves container images between nodes and registries over TLS must use cryptographic modules with an active NIST CMVP certificate, not merely FIPS-enabled libraries.

What is Echo's Dragonfly FIPS image?

Echo's Dragonfly FIPS image is a hardened, FIPS-validated build of Dragonfly on Echo's hardened base. Because Dragonfly 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 dragonfly-fips image and CVEs go to zero without disrupting your configuration, data volumes, and the clients that connect to it. 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 Dragonfly deployments, the distroless variant keeps all runtime operations — peer-to-peer image and file distribution, scheduling, and registry mirroring — fully intact while minimizing exposure; the default variant suits operators and platform teams that need shell access for inspecting configuration, diagnosing issues, or running administrative commands.

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

Public Dragonfly 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 an image distribution system used in production. Dragonfly images run continuously with access to container images, registry credentials, and traffic between nodes. OS-level CVEs in the base image — particularly in libraries such as openssl, zlib, and libc — 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 Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly needs for peer-to-peer image and file distribution, scheduling, and registry mirroring while routing cryptography through a validated module and removing the packages that don't belong in a production Dragonfly image distribution system. 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 Dragonfly image with Echo's Dragonfly FIPS image?

Yes. Echo's Dragonfly FIPS image is a drop-in replacement. Update the FROM line in your Dockerfile to the dragonfly-fips image and your workloads keep running. Configuration, data volumes, mounted secrets, and existing client connections all continue to work without changes. 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 Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly inside FedRAMP boundaries, where an image distribution system that moves container images between nodes and registries over TLS 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 Dragonfly 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 container images, registry credentials, and traffic between nodes and is reachable over the network.

Is Echo's Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly deployments, the distroless variant is the leaner, more secure choice; for operators and platform teams that need shell access for inspecting configuration, diagnosing issues, or running administrative commands, the default variant is the right fit.

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

Echo's Dragonfly FIPS image is built from source with only the absolute essentials needed to run the Dragonfly image distribution system, which significantly shrinks the attack surface. Echo also patches aggressively over time, with backports available so you can stay on the Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly 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 federal agencies, contractors, and FedRAMP-authorized providers running Dragonfly under an ATO — whether that's a FedRAMP-authorized SaaS boundary, a DoD enclave, or an agency-operated platform — Echo's FIPS-validated Dragonfly image keeps the image distribution system layer in-boundary and compliant without requiring custom hardening scripts or manual base image patching between compliance cycles.

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