Implementing a containerized environment is changing a lot not only how deployments are done but it also has a huge impact on a system and networking level and how hardware and network resources are being used.
This document is helping you to secure your containerized environment and keep it secure.
There are often misunderstandings of what the security impacts - negative or positive - are supposed to be when using Docker.
Docker as any other containerization technology doesn't solve application security problems. It doesn't help doing input validation and it doesn't provide protecting against SQL injection. For application security risks OWASP provides a lot of other useful documents, starting from the OWASP Top 10 over the OWASP Proactive Controls to the OWASP Application Security Verification standard -- just to name a few.
Container Security is mostly about system and network security and a secure architectural design.
This indicates that it is best before you start using containerization, you should plan your environment in a secure manner. Some points are just difficult or costly to change later when you started already rolling out your containerization in production.
Looking at it from the perspective of the classical world, especially in system and network areas containerization means big changes to your environment. Those changes are opening up new potential attack surfaces. Special care has to be taken so that no network and system security problems arise.
Apart from these technical areas there are two non-technical points:
- Docker is not a new technology anymore but subtracting the time for maturing and adoption, its time span is shorter. Every technology needs time until the knowledge of the technology and their best practices becomes common knowledge.
- While container solutions might offer benefits for the developer, the technology is not simple from the security perspective. Not being simple is what makes security more difficult, a.k.a. the KISS principle -- keep it simple and stupid.
This is what this document is trying to help you with: It provides you with the knowledge to avoid common pitfalls in the system and network area and it tries to get a handle on the complexity.
In order to achieve this, this document first does an analysis of the threats caused by the technology. This is the basis for the ten points to follow.
Each of those ten points has paragraphs in the following order:
- introduction,
- outline of threat scenarios,
- recommendation how to prevent the aforementioned threats,
- technical hint how to identify whether you might have a problem here
- and eventually lists references (split in commercial and non-commercial ones)
It is mostly agnostic to any orchestration framework or any other specific product (OS, programming language).