13–15 Nov 2018
America/Vancouver timezone

Improving *at(2) to make more secure container runtimes

13 Nov 2018, 11:35
15m
Junior/Ballroom-AB (Sheraton Vancouver Wall Center)

Junior/Ballroom-AB

Sheraton Vancouver Wall Center

100

Speaker

Christian Brauner (Canonical)

Description

Currently, container runtimes are faced with a large attack surface when it comes to a malicious container guest. This most obvious attack surface is the filesystem, and the wide variety of filesystem races and other such tricks that can be used to trick a container runtime into accessing files they shouldn't. To tackle this, most container runtimes have come up with necessary userspace hacks to work around these issues -- but many of the improvements are inherently flawed as they are not done from kernel-space.

In this session, a discussion of the various kernel APIs that could benefit container runtime security will be opened. Topics on the agenda would be the use of AT_EMPTY_PATH with openat(2), whether there are any more blockers for the AT_NO_JUMPS patchset, and a proposal of AT_THIS_ROOT which would allow for much more secure interaction with
container filesystems.

Presentation materials

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