What Is Container Security? The Risks and Keys for this Era

What is Container Security?

First of all, what is container security? Most people never heard of this concept.

To make it easy to understand, container security can scan the vulnerabilities and configuration information in the image, helping enterprises solve the problem that traditional security software cannot perceive the container environment.

In addition, it provides the functions of whitelisting container processes, read-only file protection, and container escape detection, which effectively prevents security risk events during container running.

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Container Security plays an important role in managing the whole risks, including all aspects of the software supply chain or CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure, container runtime, and lifecycle management applications running on the container.

In general, continuous container security is about two aspects.

• Securing the container pipeline and the application.
• Securing the container deployment environments and infrastructure.

What is Container Vulnerabilities?

The above introduction to Container Security may confuse you why we need container security. Is a container so fragile being attacked? Actually, to some extent, yes, it is and with time gone by, the risks can be anywhere.

Containers are created via images and one program can contain one or one set of containers. Risks always can find their way sneaking into containers.

There are some common threats to containers:

Container Malware – this kind of malware can hide in your containers through multiple stages of the container lifecycle. Attackers can take multiple measures to implant malware into your containers, breaking your container registry and replacing your images with the ones with malware.

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Privileged Containers – as usual, containers will perform in unprivileged mode. Access to any resources outside of the containerized environment is not available and communications are restricted. However, if privilege is allowed, some human-made errors can easily happen.

How to Secure a Container?

Even if containers are easy to be attacked, there are some available methods that can help you secure your containers.

1. Containers should be hosted in a container-focused OS.
2. The host’s health can be guaranteed by monitoring tools.
3. A strong set of security controls should be applied.
4. Secure the networking environment.
5. The container registry should be properly secured.
6. Make sure that containers are free from malware or known vulnerabilities.
7. Strong endpoint controls can be provided for Developer workstations.
8. An thorough and consistent access control scheme must be implemented.
9. Secure and monitor the application in the container.
10. Secure your container management stack that can help you coordinate your overlooked containers.
11. You need a container image scanning workflow in place to ensure that the containers you used as building blocks are reliable and secure against common threats.
12. Ensure the integrity of the build pipeline.

The Risks of Container Security

Due to the natural defects in isolation and security, container security has always been one of the core issues in the process of container transformation.

A wide range of threats tries to break containerized environments, including attacks against container images, authentication, application, and network vulnerabilities, resulting in significant amounts of data and financial theft.

However, Container Security is still a rarely-mentioned topic and people know less about it. In this new era, new challenges and risks are arising and making enterprises too late to cope with them.

There are some points you need to consider:

1. Lack of experts and professionals in this field. For open-source container tools and platforms, a shortage of skilled labor often leads to software configuration errors.
2. Lack of systematic container security capacity building. Besides, security and development teams don’t always collaborate on container security decisions and implementation.
3. More attacking chances for attackers to target kernel system vulnerabilities, container runtime components, and container application deployment configurations.
4. Container runtime security vulnerabilities can be particularly dangerous since runtime holes could attack resources in other containers and the host operating system.
5. Some organizations find it difficult to integrate existing security standards designed around alternate, outdated methodologies into containers. Having multiple security standards together with growing containers, tools and platforms add to security issues.

Bottom Line:

At last, you may have an overall picture of container security and that’s a profound and interesting concept with more secrets waiting for your exploration. Hope this article can be useful for you.