Businesses have found containers to be their go-to option for containerized application development. Moreover, according to a survey by Webinar Care, 65% of technology development industries are collaborating with third-party businesses for container management and reaping its benefits. Containers are highly scalable, resource-efficient, and portable, but they are also liable to security threats because of their complex and dynamic environment. Given the future revamp and modernization of organisations’ IT infrastructure, it is crucial to build a robust container security mechanism.
In this blog, we will be Understanding Container Security and Its Importance in 2024. We will also acknowledge the challenges associated with container security and how this blog can help different microservices that rely on containers for software functioning.
What is a Container?
Simply put, a container is like a storage tank that holds all the necessary files, documents, and software to run an application. It encapsulates the software’s runtime environment, library, programming codes, and various other dependencies, making it a self-sufficient unit for application deployment.
Containers play a pivotal role in transitioning from physical, dedicated computing resources to a streamlined, virtual, and shared infrastructure. This shift not only improves operational efficiency but also paves the way for a more agile and innovative approach to application development.
The container framework streamlines and boosts application deployment by bundling the OS infrastructure, applications, and other components into layers within a container image. A container image is a fixed software package that includes everything an application needs.
What is Container Security?
Container security plays a critical role in the comprehensive security management of containerized applications from unwanted threats using various tools and policies. Container security offers to safeguard both the applications housed within containers and the underlying infrastructure.
Ensuring the security and reliability of container images is essential to guarantee that all subsequent images originate from trustworthy sources. Container security focuses on unauthorized access, privacy breaches, malware detection, and service disruptions.
In order to protect your container pipeline, businesses can adopt practices such as sourcing trusted images, controlling access via a private registry, incorporating security tests into the process, automating deployments, and persistently protecting your infrastructure.
Container hardening involves employing scanning tools to identify potential vulnerabilities within containers and taking corrective measures to reduce the likelihood of security breaches in an ephemeral container environment.
Components of Container Security
Containerized applications do not have the same set of tools for application deployment and security. However, it is possible to run containers without an orchestrator, allowing container components to vary depending on the specific tools and platforms a team uses to manage its containers for application development.
Container security comprises several vital components aimed at ensuring the safety and integrity of containerized applications and their environments. These components typically include:
1.Image Registry Security
Attackers can breach through the registry that hosts container images, ingesting malicious code into the images that increases security risk. However, developers can avoid creating irrelevant container images to reduce the container’s attack surface.
Image evaluation tools can be embedded to forbid untrusted images and scan such images that are built to detect subsequent images that might also have compromised codes. Enforcing namespace isolation enhances security by limiting interactions between containers and the host OS kernel, thereby preventing unauthorized access or interference.
Automating patching processes ensures containers are promptly updated according to vendor patch releases, reducing vulnerabilities and preserving the overall security integrity of container environments.
2.Runtime Security
Attackers can disrupt the access management of containers and possibly even the host OS servers, putting other nodes of containers at risk. Businesses can monitor suspicious behaviors such as network calls, API calls, and unusual login attempts within your container environment to detect and respond to any security vulnerability.
Teams should establish predetermined actions to mitigate issues with pods, enabling them to isolate containers on separate networks, restart them, or halt operations until the threat is identified. This approach adds an extra security measure to defend against malware.
3.Orchestration Security
Maintaining a secure orchestration platform free of known threats is paramount in containerized environments utilizing orchestrators such as Kubernetes. Container orchestration is responsible for organizing and overseeing containers, facilitating the scalability and support of containerized applications for large user biases.
Your orchestrator typically includes inherent security functionalities, potentially enabling you to establish rules that Kubernetes can automatically apply across all pods within the cluster.
For instance, in Kubernetes container security, admins must utilize the built-in Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) framework to carefully manage and limit access to resources.
While these essential features are beneficial, they represent just the initial phase toward implementing a more comprehensive set of policies.
Importance of Container Security
Containers are sophisticated operational technologies that demand thorough monitoring within cloud workload environments. Securing containers is absolutely critical in today’s ever-growing technology threat landscape without the right strategy and tooling.
The traffic between apps in a container does not cross perimeter network security but should be checked for malicious traffic between apps and their images. Simply put, there are numerous moving pieces and different security threats.
You might risk exposing your users’ sensitive data and impacting your business with a single vulnerable container that creates a pathway into your organisation’s broader environment.
- Shifting Left: To streamline communication and reduce friction between teams, it’s crucial to incorporate security early in the development stages. This proactive approach helps identify and address flaws or misconfigurations before they impact the final product.
- Securing Containers from Build to Runtime: Container security extends beyond deployment. Monitoring containers during production is vital due to their ephemeral nature. A robust security solution that offers continuous visibility and assessment of containers at runtime is essential for detecting risks and threats within container environments.
- Choosing the Right Tools: What’s the optimal approach for integrating continuous security and monitoring into container environments? Effective communication with developers about their plans and schedules is critical to determining when and how frequently security should be integrated into the containerized build process.
This becomes especially critical when comparing the security offerings from cloud vendors with the tools and solutions internal teams can provide, ensuring these layers of security can effectively complement each other.
Some Best Practices for Container Security
These best practices enable organisations to strengthen the security posture of their containerized environments by proactively addressing vulnerabilities, integrating security throughout the development lifecycle, and ensuring compliance and optimal performance of containerized applications.
- Regularly Scan Base or “Golden” Images- Conduct frequent scans of base or “Golden” images used in your CI/CD pipelines. Identify and remediate vulnerabilities promptly to mitigate risks associated with deploying containerized applications.
- Secure Your Code and Its Dependencies- Monitor containers continuously for vulnerabilities in both code and dependencies. Integrate security checks throughout the CI/CD pipeline to detect and fix misconfigurations or policy violations early in the development process.
- Establish Guardrails for Container Orchestration- Define and enforce standards for container orchestration to secure the entire application stack. Monitor critical container events in real-time and utilize performance monitoring and analytics to optimize application performance and security.
- Include Containers in Your Broader IAM Strategy- Incorporate containers into your Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy, ensuring roles and permissions are managed according to least privilege access(LPA). Secure access to containerized resources and maintain compliance across multi-cloud environments.
These are some of the best practices for different containerized workloads, that can help eliminate the attack risk and boost team’s ability in detecting vulnerable containers or the host server during a containerized application development process.
Conclusion
Robust container security management significantly lowers the risk of deploying containers with security vulnerabilities or malicious code into production environments. While containers seem to behave like virtual machines(VMs), they actually don’t, so they require a distinct security strategy.
Containers are revolutionizing data virtualization practices where platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Uber, and Spotify work on the microservices architecture. Thus, businesses need to understand container security and its importance in 2024.
