Container Virtualization Security

Containers use the host operating system as their base and not the hypervisor.

Container virtualization security.

The threats highlighted in niap base virtualization protection profile apply equally to containers virtualized storage and sdn. Such instances called containers lxc solaris containers docker zones solaris containers virtual private servers partitions virtual environments ves virtual kernels dragonfly bsd or jails freebsd jail or chroot jail may look like real. This is likely due to the fact that vm s have reached maturity in their deployment and the attack surfaces are fairly well understood. In the same line one must bear in mind that the security of the server hosting the containers is equally important as that of the container itself.

This topic discusses some of the key similarities and differences between containers and virtual machines and when you might want to use each. In fact according to a forrestor research study 53 of enterprises deploying containers cite security as top concern. Containers are often compared to virtual machines vms because both technologies enable significant compute efficiencies by allowing multiple types of software linux or windows based to be run in a single environment. If we traverse the current market scenario it becomes clear that container based virtualization is rapidly gaining momentum across large scale enterprises as well as smes.

Although there are many advantages to moving to virtualization via containers architects must address challenges and associated risks in the following six areas. Os level virtualization is an operating system paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances. As the threats are the same the counter measures i e. Security functions that counters the threats are also the same for the aforementioned virtualized systems.

Finally security software and rules implemented at the container engine level can apply to all of its containers. Container virtualization often referred as operating system virtualization is more than just a different kind of hypervisor. Cons of virtualization via containers. What does a more porous segmentation boundary entail.

Containers and virtual machines each have their uses in fact many deployments of containers use virtual machines as the host operating system rather than running directly on the hardware especially when running containers in the cloud. A key property of containers is a more porous segmentation boundary relative to os virtualization. Containerization also called container based virtualization and application containerization is an os level virtualization method for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire vm for each application. Application containers by contrast have different properties some of which bolster security and depending on usage some that can undermine it.

Rather than virtualizing the hardware which requires full virtualized operating system images for each guest containers virtualize the.