A company runs its containerized application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). The company must ensure container images have no critical vulnerabilities and must restrict access to the images to specific IAM roles and specific AWS accounts, with minimal operational overhead. Which solution meets these requirements?

The correct solution leverages Amazon ECR's native capabilities for image security and access control. Pushing images to ECR with scan-on-push enabled automatically scans for vulnerabilities, addressing the requirement for no critical vulnerabilities. Using a central ECR account with a CI/CD pipeline for deployment to other accounts provides a scalable and manageable approach. ECR repository policies allow granular control over which AWS accounts can pull images, while identity-based policies restrict access for specific IAM roles within those accounts, meeting the access restriction requirements with minimal operational overhead. Incorrect options: Publishing to a self-managed private registry on EC2 instances increases operational overhead for maintenance, scaling, and security patching, and host-based scanners are less integrated than ECR's scan-on-push. AWS CodeArtifact is designed for application packages and dependencies, not container images, making it unsuitable for this use case. While using identity-based policies is part of the solution, the best answer explicitly mentions ECR repository policies, which are crucial for cross-account access control to ECR repositories.