Containers: Security Challenges and How to Address Them

As containers have matured from niche concept to mainstream technology and larger enterprises have begun to adopt container technologies, the inherent security risks have been in the spotlight. Thankfully, the security issues are getting a lot of attention and there are a variety of approaches to enable containers to be used without sacrificing security or exposing your organization or network to unnecessary risk. I wrote a report for DevOps.com titled Containers: Security Challenges and How to Address Them that deals with this topic.

From month to month or even week to week, more organizations are developing with containers. The concept of containers isn’t all that new, but the dramatic rise in adoption of container technologies and the support from major tech vendors and platforms has helped containers become mainstream quickly. As with most emerging technologies, now that containers are hot there is a greater focus on some of the security issues of containers. So DevOps.com worked with leading vendors to address that issue.

A new report from DevOps.com, sponsored by Aqua Security and Microsoft, examines the weaknesses of containers and that the security concerns introduced by using containers, and provides a look at some of the approaches to addressing those issues. “Containers: Security Challenges and How to Address Them” contains insights from DevOps and containers experts to help you understand the challenges and how to solve them.

The report explains, “There is a general lack of awareness of existing container security concerns and best practices. Organizations need to understand the security issues that arise due to the differences in how VMs and containers function. Enterprises need to prepare for the glut of additional files that need protection with containers and the unwieldy nature of third-party libraries that containers use. Businesses also must consider configuration mistakes including those that grant root status to containers or simply make containers overly complex. Most importantly, organizations that adopt containers need to accept responsibility for security them, and should expect to keep tabs on new container vulnerabilities as the industry discovers them.”

“Containers add a layer of obscurity that reduces visibility,” warns Amir Jerbi, CTO of Aqua Security. “You have an operating system running a container engine, which in turn runs containers. The OS is not aware what containers are running—it only sees the container engine. The container engine knows what containers are running, but has no clue what the containers are actually doing. So, if you’re running a host-based security tool to monitor the OS, you will not see what containers are running and what they’re doing.”

Read the full story and download the report at DevOps.com: Addressing Container Security Challenges.