Reno, NV – Sept. 14, 2022 – Sylabs, a provider of container technology and services for performance-intensive workloads, today announced it has been selected by America’s DataHub Consortium (ADC), in partnership with Tech Connect and Advanced Technology International (ATI), as a finalist in America’s DataHub Innovation Challenge. In addition to receiving a membership to the ADC, Sylabs has been invited to a pitch competition on September 27th at the Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit in Washington D.C. for a chance to win $50k in non-dilutive funds.
Sylabs’ pitch will revolve around building “up-armored” OCI-compatible containers that provide increased security for cloud environments as well as onfield-deployed devices out to the tactical edge. Sylabs will propose developing software container technology based on its open source Singularity containers and associated Singularity Image Format (SIF) to be adapted to fit within the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps strategy, which has a strong focus on OCI compatibility.
“Security around the software supply chain has become an increasing point of concern in virtually every industry, but it is especially sensitive where weapons systems and sensitive C4I systems are being developed and used by defense organizations,” said Jason Tuschen, CEO of Sylabs and retired Navy SEAL. “Software supply chains span everything from High Performance Computing (HPC) Clouds, where development and simulation is done, all the way to the embedded systems and software in the live production environment. A container format that can nimbly manage across testing environments down to operational environments is critical for the effective execution of a DevSecOps strategy that covers the entire build pipeline. As the leader in developing open source Singularity, the most advanced container technology used for deploying complex workloads securely in performance-intensive computing environments, Sylabs is best positioned to produce ‘up-armored’ containers applicable for deployment in hostile environments where security is paramount.”
Adding expanded security for the Singularity container ecosystem has been a particular theme of focus for Sylabs in 2022. In August the company announced a collaboration with Anchore to bring Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) support for Singularity containers through Anchore’s open source Syft. Through Syft users within the Singularity ecosystem are able to gain deep visibility into container images for the proactive securing of the software supply chain. The collaboration also enabled the utilization of Grype, Anchore’s vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems. With Grype, developers are able to quickly scan SBOMs for vulnerabilities, ensuring that the container is clean of any exploits that could be used for malicious purposes. The SIF container image format continues to receive wide support by other open source projects such as Podman and Apptainer.
