| README.md | ||
Securing Linux Containers
Table of contents
Introduction
This document is a collection of simple and very generic tips and best practices related to seciurity of Linux containers. Contenerization is considered safer by default, but then one can hear about discovered vulnerabilities that are primarly bad for applications in containers (Example: CVE-2023-49103). Tips and best practices collected here should help raise awarness about how to keep containers really secure. Contents are kept container-engine agnostic, but examples will be based on actual implementations (Podman, k8s).
Secrets
Secret is the most vulnerable data, as it usually can open access to other private data. They might also allow modification of the environment, which means possibilities for further access or many other forms of attack.
Warning
Don't use environment variables for secrets
Container isolation made providing and managing secrets somewhat harder, as they need to cross the additional barier. This casued the rather dangerous trend of providing secrets among many other configuration data in form of environment variables. At first sight it might look like good idea, but when actually compared to other means of storing secrets it turns out that environment variables might be much easier to access by attacker, than for example arbitrary files. CVE-2023-49103 is only an example of vulnerability which was considered to be more dangerous for contenerized apps, because of the vulnerability being based on gaining access to env variables.
Alternatives
Files
Files with secrets are common and broadly supported. With proper setup they can be also very secure.
- Keep configuration and secret files on entirely different path than other data
- If application runs main process under different user than worker processes (which usually have direct contact with user interaction), the configuration should not be readable by the worker process user.
- Depending on the technology used, storage of the secret files inside of a container could be temporary/volatile. In kubernetes Secret objects are mounted as tmpfs. Example for mounting secret as tmpfs in pod:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: app
spec:
containers:
- name: app
image: registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:latest
command: [ "sleep", "infinity" ]
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /config
name: config
volumes:
- name: config
secret:
secretName: config
This produces readonly tmpfs mount inside:
bash-5.2# df -h /config/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 4.8G 4.0K 4.8G 1% /config
bash-5.2# ls -la /config/
total 0
drwxrwxrwt. 3 root root 100 Nov 9 14:00 .
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 24 Nov 9 14:00 ..
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 60 Nov 9 14:00 ..2024_11_09_14_00_47.4065932771
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 32 Nov 9 14:00 ..data -> ..2024_11_09_14_00_47.4065932771
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 18 Nov 9 14:00 secret.conf -> ..data/secret.conf