Techniques to secure containers
1. Techniques to secure containers
Containers are convenient and make sharing CPU, storage, memory, and network resources easy and portable. An important part of being a cloud security professional is securing containers. In this video, we’ll explore ways to keep containers secure so that you’re prepared for a role in cloud security. It’s important to know the rules when it comes to securing containers. First, don’t put anything in your container that you don’t need. This can give attackers a larger surface to breach. If you find tools you don’t need, remove them. If you leave them there, attackers might use them. Second, use verified or signed images. Third, scan each image you use to make sure there are no vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. Pro tip: be aware that images that may have been verified as secure originally can have new vulnerabilities later. A container deployment platform lets you build containers and deploy them. They may include command-line interfaces, or CLIs, that allow you to input commands to deploy the containers. A container deployment platform is a software solution that allows you to manage containerized applications. It provides capabilities like automation, orchestration, governance, security, customization, and enterprise support for container architectures. Now, let’s explore deployment and security with automation using a container orchestration system. There are a few container orchestration systems available to cloud security professionals. For example, Kubernetes is one of the more popular orchestration systems you might come across in your career. Kubernetes is a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and managing containers. If a container goes down, Kubernetes will start a new one using automation. This makes the process easier because it’s done for you automatically. Kubernetes also includes built-in commands to deploy applications, scale up and down for changing needs, monitor applications, and roll out changes. The Kubernetes platform handles a lot of the work that goes into application management, runs health checks against services, and replaces stalled containers when they’re unhealthy. This means that containers are not updated or patched, but replaced by new versions. This allows you to roll the container back to a previous version if vulnerabilities are discovered in new code. Even after completely replacing containers, there are still vulnerabilities you need to be aware of. Let’s explore some of them together. Kubernetes is a useful deployment system, but there are some vulnerabilities that can happen at different stages. When containers are being built, all the code needs to be trusted, and checked. Code from any untrusted registries might contain backdoors which can allow potential attackers in. When building containers, you also want to avoid too much clutter. Remember to search for any unnecessary libraries and dependencies. To keep these artifacts from becoming compromised, delete them as soon as you find them. There are some considerations you’ll need to be aware of during deployment. First, never grant unnecessary privileges. Only grant what is necessary for the task to shrink the attack surface. Next, avoid problems by using namespaces to group services for your application, and to isolate applications in your container clusters. Then, use policies to divide the network into segments. Finally, use role-based access controls, or RBAC to prevent unauthorized access. Vulnerability scanning is another process that can help you find any vulnerabilities in your container images. You can manually scan your container software images, or you can use automation. When you use automation, it will automatically scan each container you deploy to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. Security threats can also happen in containers. As a cloud security professional, you’ll need to be able to detect and respond to these threats. Using container runtime security can help you detect abnormal behavior, and stop a threat by isolating a container on a different network. It can pause or restart a container if it finds potential problems. It can also enforce run-time policies. Now that you know more about securing containers, you can keep them safe from attackers!2. Let's practice!
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