The on-going endeavour to secure containers, including their pipeline, deployment infrastructure, and supply chain, is known as "container security." The difficulty of protecting containers continues because the container environment is more complicated and ephemeral than conventional security.
Software that can operate on any operating system and infrastructure is known as a "container." As a full runtime environment, a container may let programmes transition between physical and virtual environments, or from development to staging and production. It's important to have containers, but they don't have their own security architecture, exposing the firm to extra attack points.
Container Security Issues.
The absence of security measures in containers creates its own set of security problems.
Visibility
Visibility is the key problem. When a system's controls and vulnerabilities can be seen, this is referred to as its visibility. It's difficult to tell whether an event came from the container or the host since containers lack centralized management. Because containers are ephemeral, we lose forensic evidence when we end them.
A container's safety might be difficult to assess. It is typical for an IT department to get a container produced by a development team, which is likely to have been developed using software from other sources and so on. A container is considered insecure unless it has been documented in development and the user is given access to that documentation. You can learn more Container Visibility techniques with Extreme Compute.
Setting it up and forgetting about it.
Setting and forgetting is another problem with container management. For suspicious activities, misconfiguration, excessive access, and susceptible software components, containers should be monitored (such as libraries, frameworks, etc.). Yesterday's security may no longer be valid today.
Scanning for risk
Some containers are well-protected by enterprises. As a consequence of this responsible approach, the findings of every vulnerability scan have to be categorised, prioritised, and mitigated. At every stage of the crisis response, containers overwhelm teams who still use manual procedures. Network and workload security are the primary focus of traditional security technologies. A container's attack surface comprises hosts, networks, and endpoints, all of which have vulnerabilities.
Security for containers
The DevOps pipeline must be integrated to secure a container environment.
A secure container image is the first step in container image security. Malware or unsafe libraries may be included in the basic images used by programmers.
It is also possible for developers to overlook the removal of passwords and secret keys before registering the image. As a result of a security compromise, passwords and photographs would be exposed. When it comes to finding security flaws, a build system image inspection is essential.
CI/CD PIPELINE SECURITY
Use it for:
- Maintain the integrity of your pipeline by ensuring that only authorised images are allowed to travel through and be executed on your hosts or Kubernetes cluster.
- Secrets/keys/OSS licencing are all things that should be monitored for.
- The vulnerability of the pipeline should be reduced: Before deploying containers, scan downloaded base images for malware.
- Improve security operations visibility by giving context for configuration errors and compliance violations.
Realtime security
To protect application data, the container and worker nodes must be visible. Container and worker node behaviour should be captured and correlated by a suitable container security mechanism.
This visibility is helpful because:
- You may use this functionality to block bad behaviour while keeping your containers running normally.
- Faster detection of container issues; When container-related issues are detected, investigate them as fast as possible.
- See everything: The events and start/stop, runtime information for each container should be recorded.
- Deploy using Kubernetes as deployment may be scaled by using a Kubernetes cluster.
- Get Kubernetes namespace, pod, and network events to better manage containers.
In a cloud context, containers may provide more services than hypervisors, saving money and effort. To make containerization more convenient, a wide range of goods and services have appeared on the market. For container technology, these are some of the most prevalent platforms:
- Aa a pioneering platform for fast application development, Docker is a container. Docker Hub has more than 5 million registered users and 6 million repositories.
- Kubernetes in a nutshell is an open-source platform for containerized workloads. Kubernetes uses automation rather than a single node to manage containers across a cluster.
- Pre-packaged cloud infrastructure solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud environments are available from Extreme Compute Cloud (EC Cloud).
EC cloud offers security teams with a comprehensive set of cloud security tools: Know more about EC Container Security Posture Management