Docker Official Images: Official images won’t have a publisher listed, and they will be tagged with “Official Image”.

Docker Official Images are a set of images curated by Docker. They’re generally recommended for new users as Docker has a team that reviews and publishes these images. Beyond Docker’s verification, you can see how an individual image was built. Navigate to the GitHub image library. Find the file corresponding with the image, and you’ll see a GitRepo line. Navigate to that URL to find the Dockerfiles that were used to build the image.

Docker Certified: Other images will be certified by Docker – these are published by someone other than Docker but have been tested & scanned for vulnerabilities, they come from a reputable source, and comply with best practice guidelines.

If you click on the hyperlinked organization name, they are listed as a verified publisher – this means someone put a little effort into ensuring “Oracle” is actually the corporation everyone thinks of when they hear “Oracle”

Other Images: You’ll also find containers that are not certified that have been published by un-verified parties. Don’t use these without some investigation.

We happen to interact with OpenHAB developers and “know” the guy who builds these images. I trust him and do run this image on my home network. I also know where to go to view his Dockerfiles, and I know how his images are built. https://github.com/openhab/openhab-docker

But there are images posted by random Internet denizens – I run Docker on my personal Windows laptop and needed to access the underlying MobyVM. The image justincormack/nsenter1 will do it … but I have no idea who this person is. A quick search of the Internet yielded a Dockerfile for this image, but there’s nothing that ensures the image on Docker Hub is actually built with this file. It’s safer to use the Dockerfile to build your own version of the image.