Containers are making life easy by packaging the application and its dependencies together in a single image through the development, test, and production cycle. Regardless of the environment, containers provide consistency in deployments. This reduces the effort in developing and managing applications. Enterprises are moving to a more agile process for software development and are transforming their processes with containers as a preferred technology.
Compared to VMs, containers in combination with cloud technology shorten the application development time and consume comparatively fewer compute and storage resources. Containers are extremely portable and can work in a multicloud environment. This is making container technology popular with enterprises. According to Gartner, by 2022 more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.
Agility in the software development process certainly provides business value, but enterprises also require strong security. The question arises: are containers secure? Container security doesn’t just secure the process but also involves other elements like the underlying infrastructure, application, network, storage, and the APIs integrating all this. Nevertheless, many vulnerabilities experienced by professionals are typically generated during the development stage rather than at runtime. Let’s further dissect the container vulnerabilities, which are almost analogous to operating system and application vulnerabilities in monolithic architecture:
Misconfigurations through access and authorization
Developers need to pay special attention while configuring and securing access and authorization in the operating system and application. Any configuration failures can lead to unauthorized access, exposing crucial information.
API server access
The essential gateway for intruders is often the API server, which can expose the containers. It is important to protect and secure all access to the API server to avoid breaches and attacks.
Image vulnerabilities
Images play an important role in containers as they contain all the crucial information of the application. Image registries, which store images, can be corrupted if hacked. It is important to follow practices to detect contaminated images; one way is to use signed images.
Network contamination
If any of the containers in the network are compromised, it can communicate with other containers in the network through encrypted APIs. Malware in one container can spread to others, and encryption may hide this malware, making it undetected. One solution to this issue can be using an overlay network and stronger segmentation.
There can be many other vulnerabilities in containers. The best way is to secure the container layer by layer and put in place processes to monitor and detect vulnerabilities. Container security can be managed by following a few best practices. Regardless of a few vulnerabilities, containers are attracting adopters not just for their speed, efficiency, and scalability but also for their self-contained security model.
