About Minimus Hardened Images

Minimus Hardened images provide secure by default configurations that comply with CIS Benchmarks. The CIS Benchmark for PostgreSQL 17 is a consensus-based security hardening guide that is aligned with industry standards and defines recommended configuration settings, access controls, and operational practices to reduce the attack surface. Review the compliance report to see the special audit report.

Notes:

• The image’s default configuration file enforces many CIS PostgreSQL hardening controls. Exercise caution when overriding this file, as custom configurations may inadvertently weaken or negate CIS compliance.
• Full CIS benchmark compliance requires additional post-deployment runtime validations that are out of scope for Minimus.

FIPS 140-3 Certification

This image is FIPS-validated to ensure its cryptographic operations meet the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) required for secure government and regulated environments. Its core cryptographic modules are validated under the NIST Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) and comply with the FIPS 140-3 standard.

To verify that the FIPS 140-3 provider is configured and active, follow the instructions in the FIPS compliance tab.

Try It Out

Take the Minimus Postgres image for a test run. The following command will set the superuser password to Minimus! but you can set any password you want:

docker run --rm -d --name my-minimus-postgres \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=Minimus! \
reg.mini.dev/postgres-hardened-fips

The environment variable POSTGRES_PASSWORD is required, as it sets the password. Note that this test container will not persist the data so as soon as the container stops, the data will be lost.

docker run -d --name my-minimus-postgres \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=Minimus! \
-v $(pwd)/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
reg.mini.dev/postgres-hardened-fips

Note: the data directory will consequently be owned by UID 10001.

Postgres will now automatically store its data in the target directory on your host so it won't be lost when you restart the container.

Open an interactive shell in your running container.

docker exec -it my-minimus-postgres sh

Switch from the root user to the postgres user and access the shell:

su postgres
psql

CREATE DATABASE minimus_test;

Next, we will list all databases:

\l

Postgres will print database metadata. For example:

postgres=# \l
                                                       List of databases
     Name     |  Owner   | Encoding | Locale Provider |   Collate   |    Ctype    | Locale | ICU Rules |   Access privileges   
--------------+----------+----------+-----------------+-------------+-------------+--------+-----------+-----------------------
 minimus_test | postgres | UTF8     | libc            | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |        |           | 
 postgres     | postgres | UTF8     | libc            | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |        |           | 
 template0    | postgres | UTF8     | libc            | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |        |           | =c/postgres          +
              |          |          |                 |             |             |        |           | postgres=CTc/postgres
 template1    | postgres | UTF8     | libc            | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |        |           | =c/postgres          +
              |          |          |                 |             |             |        |           | postgres=CTc/postgres
(4 rows)

Next, connect to the database you just created:

\c minimus_test

Once connected, create a table:

CREATE TABLE users (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    email VARCHAR(100)
);

Insert rows to create new users:

INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES ('John Doe', 'john@example.com');
INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES ('Jane Smith', 'jane@example.com');

Review the users just created:

SELECT * FROM users;

You should see a table such as:

minimus_test=# select * from users;
 id |    name    |      email       
----+------------+------------------
  1 | John Doe   | john@example.com
  2 | Jane Smith | jane@example.com
(2 rows)

Technical Considerations

The Postgres-Hardened-FIPS image provided by Minimus is a slim, security-hardened alternative to the public image from Docker Hub. The images are largely interchangeable, with a few differences as noted below.