runc VS kaniko

I can speak to this. Containers, and by extension k8s, break a well known security boundary that has existed for a very long time - whether you are using a real (hardware) server or a virtual machine on the cloud if you pop that instance/server generally speaking you only have access to that server. Yeh, you might find a db config with connection details if you landed on say a web app host but in general you still have to work to start popping the next N servers.

That's not the case when you are running in k8s and the last container breakout was just announced ~1 month ago: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/G... .

At the end of the day it is simply not a security boundary. It can solve other problems but not security ones.

It's interesting that, in light of things like this, you still see large software companies adding support for new components written in non-memory safe languages (e.g. C)

As an example Red Hat OpenShift added support for crun(https://github.com/containers/crun) this year(https://cloud.redhat.com/blog/whats-new-in-red-hat-openshift...), which is written in C as an alternative to runc, which is written in Go(https://github.com/opencontainers/runc)...

Rabbit hole indeed. That wasn't related to my job at the time, lol. The job change came with a company-provided computer and that put an end to the tinkering.

BTW, I found my hacks to make runc run on Chromebook: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/compare/main...gabrys...

being the main author of crun, I can clarify that statement: I am not a fan of Go _for this particular use case_.

Using C instead of Go avoided a bunch of the workarounds that exists in runc to workaround the Go runtime, e.g. https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/blob/main/libcontaine...

runc

Not OP, but if I had to guess, a lot of this can be picked up by just observing common security issues in the Linux space, since similar mistakes and oversights have caused quite a few real-world CVEs in the past, e.g. this random example of a TOCTTOU vulnerability in runc.

If all you need to do is build container, you can use https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko

Kaniko for building the container images

kaniko

You should maybe look into Kaniko or use some other build tool

If you are using the docker socket just for building container images, you might want to look into kaniko. It doesn't use docker to build images. If you use the socket also for starting containers (we are actually doing that in our CI pipelines), you could think about limiting the pods Kubernetes schedules on a node (you can change the default of 110 using the kubelet config file).

Check out Kaniko for building containers https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko . Only issue is it doesnt support windows containers.

It took less than 5 minutes to install. It quickly analysed the repo and identified easy ways to make the project more secure. Priya Wadhwa, Kaniko

I'd suggest to take a look at the Kaniko project, combined with custom container images in Lambda functions.

kaniko is a tool that allows you to build container images inside Kubernetes without the need for the Docker daemon. Effectively, it allows you to build Docker images without docker build.

Kubernetes prefers to pull containers from registries. You may be able to work around it by specifying a local image in your Kube manifest. Both https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko and/ or https://www.devspace.sh/ may help.