runc VS nanos

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.

I am a bit confused, there are three sites:

* https://nanos.org/

* https://nanovms.com/

* https://ops.city/

And I am not sure what "thing" I am using. Is there some disambiguation? I know is OPS is the orchestration CLI, but I am confused at the difference between Nanos and NanoVMs. What should I call the section of my README that deals with this tech? Currently gone with Nanos/OPS but I am confused.

I work with https://nanos.org && https://ops.city - we can run thousands of these on commodity hardware.

Unik was just a build tool that utilized other projects like Rump, Mirage, IncludeOS, etc. It's now dead since Solo pivoted a very long time ago to service mesh/api gateways.

The GoRump port they use was from us and then we realized we needed to code our own from the ground up for many reasons so we wrote https://nanos.org (runs as a go unikernel in GCP).

A couple unikernel projects that caught my eye in the past may be of interest to you. I have no experience with them, so I can't speak to their quality though.

https://unikraft.org/

https://github.com/nanovms/nanos

Definitely agree with the top part, however, I should note that, ops, the tool's, whole existence is to create disk images and upload them to any cloud, any hypervisor.

In particular, both https://ops.city && https://nanos.org are Go unikernels running on GCP and their deploys take just a few seconds to push out. AWS can be even faster cause we skip the s3 upload part. We also have lots of people using Azure which would be utilizing vhdx.

I'm with that organization that works on https://nanos.org and https://ops.city . If you aren't a software engineer but still would like to use unikernels you're in luck - we also have a package repository at https://repo.ops.city/ (running as a go unikernel on GCP) that will allow you to run and deploy pre-made applications. If you don't see something that you'd like to us there's also a way of importing docker containers into unikernels via ops which works for most (but not all) applications.

I think Unikernels like NanoVMs (https://nanos.org/) will become more important. They are more efficient and more secure than than full operating systems. Right now, I think there are no good monitoring solutions available (or at least I am not aware of any). You can't just ssh to your server, so if something goes wrong, it can be hard to debug. And they are certainly not integrated into bigger monitoring solutions like Dynatrace. But once the infrastructure is available, I would expect a large percentage of Linux servers to be replaced with unikernels.