Enhancing Security: A Vital Aspect of Modern DevOps and Cloud Environments
Sarah Jacobson 
The digital landscape is constantly evolving and changing, making it crucial for development teams to stay updated on the latest tools and solutions to ensure smooth and safe digital presence for companies. An essential tool that has become crucial for development teams are containers, which is a lightweight and portable method to deploy and manage applications across different environments. With the rise in this solution, a key issue has also arisen, which is the matter of container security. With more and more organizations migrating to cloud-based infrastructures and simultaneously adopting microservices architectures, it has become more crucial than ever to secure these environments.
Introducing Containers
To answer the question “what is container security“, it is firstly important to understand what containers are and to what they have been used by DevOps and cloud-native architectures. When someone is referring to containers, they are referring to software packages bundling an application’s code along with its dependencies, libraries, and configuration files. Opposite the traditional virtual machines (VMs) which include an entire operating system (OS), containers instead share a host system’s OS kernel, while simultaneously isolating the application from the rest of the system.
Since containers are both portable and efficient, they have become ideal for cloud environments and distributed systems. Container technologies have revolutionized how organizations build, test, and deploy applications at a larger scale. As container technologies are becoming more and more applied, new security challenges have been revealed within these infrastructures.
The Important Role of Container Security
Where container technologies bring software packages with opportunities, container security involves implementing measures to protect containers and their environments. This protection is especially focused on potential cyber threats. When any type of technology gains widespread use, it also become attractive targets for attackers. If containers are insecure, the consequences can include data breaches, compromised systems, and unauthorized access to sensitive information.
The need for robust container security has only increased in the past years. With the rise of DevOps practices, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and microservices architectures, security gaps can arise as there is a strong focus on rapid software deployment. Container security is therefore important to ensure that speed and agility does not happen at the cost of security.
Isolation and Vulnerable Images
There are several challenges related to securing containerized environments, and it is therefore important to employ a proactive approach to prevent any type of security breach. One challenge to be addressed is the isolation of containers. As containers have the ability to isolate processes from one another, there is a challenge with this isolation not being foolproof. Since various containers share the host OS kernel, this also means that if an attacker can access the kernel, they will automatically also gain access to multiple containers. It is especially dangerous for containers escapes, where an attacker breaks out of the isolated environment and gains control over the host system.
Another challenge is the vulnerability of images. All containers are built from images, and these can be sourced from various repositories. If there are any vulnerabilities with these images, which could for example be an outdated library or insecure dependencies, then these vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers. It is especially the case for public container image repositories, as these often contain images that have not been updated or vetted, which can increase the risk of deploying vulnerable code in production.
Unsecured APIs, Lack of Visibility, and Supply Chain Attacks
Numerous APIs are provided to manage the deployment, scaling, and operation of containers. If left unsecured or improperly configured, these APIs can easily be exploited for attackers to gain unauthorized access to containers and their underlying infrastructure. Furthermore, as containers are ephemeral by nature, it means that they are created, used, and destroyed quickly. Due to this short lifecycle, it can be difficult for security teams to gain visibility into container activity. This makes it hard to monitor for suspicious behavior or retract logs.
In most cases, developers rely on third-party libraries and open-source components in container environments to ensure a quick build of applications. On the flip side of this setup, the risk of supply chain attacks in introduced, since malicious code can be injected into trusted dependencies. Consequently, this would lead to attackers gaining access to the environment through benign components.
Most Practices for Container Security
To secure containers, it is important to adopt an approach that entails both technology and processes. This entails always sourcing container images from trusted and verified repositories. By regularly scanning images for vulnerabilities and keeping them up to date with security patches will improve security. It can be beneficial to implement image scanning tools, which can automatically check container images for vulnerabilities. In addition, it is important to enforce the principle of least privilege. For containers to perform their tasks, they should be running on the least number of privileges necessary.
The benefits of network segmentation are many, as isolating containers at the network level can limit the impact of a security breach. Coupling this with securing containers is regularly updated, both container images and the underlying host systems, will enhance the security level for containers.
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