Why Container Security is important ?

Introduction

In the past two - three years, we have seen a massive acceleration in the shift of cloud during pandemic and organizations are moving to ad distributed IT Infrastructure, spread across multiple clouds. According to CNCF 2021 survey, 96% of the organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes to run cloud native applications. According to Gartner, container adoption continues to grow and by 2023, Gartner expects that 70 percent of organizations will be running more than two containerized applications. Although, organizations have been deploying applications across multiple cloud providers and in hybrid clouds across public and private clouds for a while now, with Kubernetes, organizations can build consistent, software-defined IT that is cloud provider independent and that is optimized for their specific requirements.

Containers and the Kubernetes orchestration platform have emerged as the most widely used standards for building, packing, and operating new cloud-native applications that have loosely connected, highly scalable architectures in multi-cloud and hybrid settings. The way developers, operations, and security teams communicate has evolved as a result of the growing adoption of containerized architectures. In addition to creating new possibilities for cloud-native and hybrid DevOps use cases, containerized architecture also brought with it new risks and points of vulnerability.

Existing cybersecurity technology are difficult for organizations to repurpose due to the sheer size and ephemeral nature of modern container systems, and existing cybersecurity tools are not designed to deal with container-specific dangers such as protecting Kubernetes clusters and registries.

Benefits of Containerization

Most people are familiar with the benefits of containerization – it’s a great way to package up applications and make them more portable. But what about container security? Is your containerized application as secure as it could be?

First, let’s look at some of the benefits of using containers. Containers can help you to:

• Package up your application code, dependencies, and configurations into a self-contained unit
• Run your application in multiple environments, including on-premises, hybrid cloud, and public cloud
• Scale your application up or down quickly and easily
• Deploy your application more rapidly

Why container security is important ?

The factors that make traditional infrastructure security crucial also apply to container security: a security breach might expose a company to millions of dollars in fines, lost productivity, decreased sales, and even dissolution.

Significant increase in container adoption in past few years, makes containers a low hanging target for malicious actors and a single vulnerable / compromised container could potentially become a point of entry into an organization’s environment. Along with the rise in traffic traversing the data center and in the cloud, there are quite few security controls monitoring this source of network traffic. Significant adoption and few security controls to monitor the source of network traffic underscores the importance of container security because the traditional security solutions offer no protection against lateral attacks.

Now let's look at some of the key security considerations for securing containers running in the environment.

• Container Host and container runtime Security - Since the host and the container share the same kernel, kernel vulnerabilities that an attacker is able to perform on a container can have a direct impact on the host it is crucial to secure both container run time and the host operating system.
• Securing the application in the container - IT should leverage tools to have real-time visibility into activities running within running containers either using signature or ML powered behavior analytics to identity runtime threats.
• Securing the container image - Make sure that any container images are created using modern best practices. This involves checking images for known or zero-day vulnerabilities, guarding against malware infection, not allowing hardcoded credentials to leak into them, etc.
• Securing the container registry - IT should have continuous visibility along with minimal access control for container images stored in registry and have to rest ensure that the image cannot be compromised, modified and unauthorized accessed.
• Securing the container network traffic - Traffic flow in containerized should be closely monitored using either behavior analytics and machine learning to identify any suspicious patterns and should have appropriate network security policies inplace to prevent data leaks.

Security considerations / Best practices for Container Instances

As the use of containers as a whole increases, container security has gained attention. One of the main advantages of container security is that it addresses all aspects of securing a containerized app and its infrastructure

1. Use a Private Registry - Containers are built from images that are stored in one or more repositories. These repositories can belong to a public registry or private registry. A publicly available container image does not guarantee security. Container images consist of multiple software layers, and each software layer might have vulnerabilities. To help reduce the threat of attacks, you should store and retrieve images from a private registry.
2. Monitor and Scan container Images - leverage solutions to scan container images in a private registry and identify potential vulnerabilities.
3. Protect Credentials - Containers can spread across several clusters and across public or private clouds, so credentials required for logins or API access must be secured. Ensure that only privileged users have access to those containers in transit and at rest.
4. Vulnerability Management - Using effective vulnerability management throughout the container development lifecycle, you can identify and resolve security concerns before they become a more serious problem. New vulnerabilities are discovered all the time, so scanning for and identifying vulnerabilities is a continuous process. Periodically audit images deployed in production to identify images that are out of date or have not been updated in a while
5. Enforce Least Privileges in Runtime - Ensuring that containers operate with the least privileges and access required to complete the job reduces your risk. When a vulnerability is exploited, the attacker typically gains access and privileges equivalent to those of the compromised application or process.
6. Remove Unneeded Privileges - By removing any unneeded or superfluous processes or privileges from the container runtime, you can further reduce the possible attack surface.
7. Limit containers to access or run safe listed files and executable - Limiting containers to access a safe list of files and executables can reduce the exposure to risk. It reduces the attack surface but can also provide a baseline for anomalies.
8. Enforce network segmentation on running containers - Network segmentation / nano-segmentation can help protecting containers running in one subnet from security risk in another subnet. In businesses where compliance regulations must be followed, maintaining network segmentation may also be necessary in order to deploy containers.
9. Monitor container activity and user access - To immediately spot any suspect or malicious activity, you should continuously monitor activity and user access in your container ecosystem, just like you would do as a best practice in any other IT environment.
10. Monitor resources that your container access - Monitoring resources is always useful both for performance monitoring and as a security measure.
11. Keep a precise audit trail of every administrative access to your Kubernetes cluster, container registry, and container image library. These logs will be valuable as forensic evidence in the event of a security issue and may be required for auditing purposes.

Container security is important, and there are best practices you can follow to improve your security posture. Additionally, make sure you are using a registry host and that your containers are running on separate networks to help mitigate any potential vulnerabilities.