I’ve read that standard containers are optimized for developer productivity and not security, which makes sense.
But then what would be ideal to use for security? Suppose I want to isolate environments from each other for security purposes, to run questionable programs or reduce attack surface. What are some secure solutions?
Something without the performance hit of VMs
It is the application Docker that is not secure. Containers are. In fact Docker runs a daemon as root to wich you communicate from a client. This is what makes it less secure; running under root power. It also has a few shortcomings of privileged containers. This can be easily solved by using podman and SELinux. If you can manage to run Docker rootless, then you are magnitudes higher in security.
There can also be old images with e.g. old openssl versions being used. Its not a concern if they are updated frequently, but still manual.
This is a problem of the containerized program and the image itself. This problem affect, containers, VM, and baremetal aswel.
I agree.
But imo these usecases are more known and mature in traditional setups, we could apt update and restart a systemd service and its done.
Its not so obvious and there are no mechanisms for containers/images.
(I am not into devops/sysadmin, so this might also be my lack of exposure)
Where did you read that and which arguments did the authors make?
Many times, the configuration of Docker is the issue, e.g. mounting stuff like files from /etc/ or the Docker socket from the outside, using insecure file permissions or running the application as root user.
If you use rootless Docker or Podman, you already eliminated one of the security risks. The same goes for the other mentioned things.
What exactly do you mean by “questionable programs”? If you want to run malware, you shouldn’t do so in an environment where it can break out of anything. There’s the possibility of hardware virtualisation which prevents many of the outbreaks possible, but even then, exploits have been found.
You’re really only secure if you run questionable software on an airgapped computer with no speakers and never run anything else on it.
What would be your use case?
There are multiple use cases I have in mind, but one of them is running proprietary software I don’t outright trust. For example, zoom video conferencing for work, or steam for games.
How come no speakers? Is it to prevent your ears from being blasted just in case, or is there malware that can be transmitted through audio?
