Weaknesses Impacting Computing Security

How to Protect Your Containerized Applications?

In our age of emergent cloud computing services, protecting containerized applications is more than ever important for your organizations1 Why? Because containerization via cloud computing is widely used by a growing number of businesses in modern software development to improve deployment speed, reliability and resources utilization. Securing containerized applications involves a multi-layered approach addressing several aspects of cloud computing security and containers management. Containers offer improved scalability, high availability, resource efficiency, self-healing capabilities, portability, and much more. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate to notice that containerized applications through cloud computing services also introduce various specific cybersecurity challenges necessitating defensive measures and protective approaches. This is why we are focusing on such a topic within our August 2024 Newsletter targeting, among others, Software Developers and IT Architects.

[1]For the purposes of this newsletter, “organizations” is an umbrella term comprising “companies” & “SMEs” as delineated within the Canada Labour Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. L-2) and the Québec Labour Code and Regulation Respecting Labour Standards, CQLR c N-1.1, r 3.

Abridged Definitions of Cloud Computing and Containerized Applications

On the one hand, cloud computing is the on-demand availability of various computing resources – such as data storage, servers, and networking – via the Internet1. This implies you can access and utilize these computing resources without having to manage by yourself the physical hardware. Some fundamental characteristics of cloud computing are: (1) on-demand self-service: users can provision resources as needed automatically; (2) broad network access: resources are accessible throughout the Internet from diverse devices; (3) resources pooling: providers amalgamate resources to serve multiple users, dynamically allocating them on the basis of demand; (4) rapid elasticity: computing resources can be quickly scaled up or down as needed; (5) measured services: computer resources usage is monitored and invoiced on the basis of consumption. In a nutshell, cloud computing provides several benefits including cost savings, increase speed and agility, unlimited expandability, and enhanced strategic value for organizations.

On the other hand, containerized applications are software applications that function within isolated environments of codes called containers. These containers package or wrap the applications along with all its dependencies – such as libraries, binaries and configuration files – into a single lightweight executable. The procedures of containerizing applications allow application development to be faster, more efficient, and more secure by dividing and separating distinctive functionalities from hardware dependencies and other pieces of software. In that way, containers can function on any host operating system and they are isolated from other software and hardware objects, making them versatile tools for designing and assembling applications that can be created once and then operated anywhere2.

[1] Thomas Erl and Eric Monroy. Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology, Security and Architecture. 2nd Paperback Edition of August 2023, Pearson Publishing PLC, London, England, UK. 608 pages. https://www.pearson.com/en-ca/subject-catalog/p/cloud-computing-concepts-technology-and-architecture-second-edition/P200000009788/9780138052256

[2] Justin Domingus and John Arundel. Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes: Building, Deploying and Scaling Modern Applications in the Cloud. 2nd Paperback Edition of April 2022, O’Reilly Media Educational Publisher, Sebastopol, California, USA, 353 pages. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/cloud-native-devops/9781492040750/

Safeguarding Your Containerized Applications from the Ground Up

Safeguarding containerized applications networking is crucial to protect your applications from potential cyber threats and cyber attacks. Securing containerized applications encompasses numerous best cybersecurity practices to ensure the integrity, deployment capacity and functioning safety of your applications and IT infrastructure. Summarized hereunder are some comprehensive protection approaches and best cybersecurity practices to safeguard your containerized applications from the ground up:

1 – Network Security

  1. Network Segmentation: Use network policies to segment and restrict communication between containers. Tools like Calico or Cilium can help manage network policies in Kubernetes. Isolate container networks from each other, and from the host network. By doing so, you can limit the impact of a compromised container and prevent lateral movement by cyber attackers.
  2. Bridge Networks: It is more secure to use bridge networks. Instead of relying on default bridge networks, create custom bridge networks to better manage containers communication.
  3. Network Policies Implementation: Use network policies to control the communication between containers. This can help restrict traffic to only what is necessary for the containerized application to function well.
  4. Firewalls Usage: Deploy firewalls to block unwanted traffic to your containers. This adds an extra layer of security by filtering incoming and outgoing traffic.
  5. Network Traffic Encryption: Ensure that all network traffic between containers is encrypted. Network traffic encryption can be proactively implemented and achieved by using protocols like Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.3) to protect data in transit.
  6. Network Traffic Surveillance: Continuously monitor network traffic for unusual patterns or potential cyber threats. Devices and tools like Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can help identify and respond to suspicious activities.
  7. Network Exposure Limitation: Minimize the exposure of containerized applications to the public Internet. Consider making use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to guarantee the safety of access to your containerized applications networking.

2 – Data Encryption

Data stored within containers can be encrypted by using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Often, the service is already integrated within the container. The data in transit should be encrypted and protected to avoid unauthorized access using TLS 1.3, with robust ciphers.

TLS 1.3 is the latest version of the TLS protocol and brings notable security improvements to you and your users, aligned with our goal of securing the Internet. Specifically, TLS 1.3 provides:

  1. Modern ciphers and key-exchange algorithms, with forward secrecy as a structural baseline.
  2. Removal of older, less-secure ciphers and key exchange methods, as well as an overall reduction in the complexity of the protocol.
  3. Low handshake latency (one round-trip between client and server) for full handshakes, which directly contributes to a good end-user experience.

3 – Host Security

  1. Harden the Host System: Ensure the host operating system is hardened and regularly patched. Make use of tools like Lynis or OpenSCAP to audit the security of the host.
  2. Use a Minimal Host OS: Consider using a minimal, container-optimized operating system like CoreOS or Alpine Linux to reduce the cyber-attack surface.

4 – Orchestration Security

  1. Secure Kubernetes Clusters: Use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) or Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) to manage permissions, and ensure that Kubernetes API servers are secured, properly authenticated and not publicly accessible.
  2. Audit Logs: Enable and regularly review audit logs for Kubernetes and other orchestration tools to monitor for suspicious activities.

5 – Containers Runtime Safety

  1. Principle of Least Privileges: Manage containers with the minimum necessary privileges. Avoid running containers as roots. Instead, utilize namespaces for users to isolate various containers.
  2. Security Contexts Application: Use security contexts and Kubernetes Pod Security Policies or similar features to enforce security policies at runtime.
  3. Containers Isolation: Use namespaces and control groups (C-Groups) to isolate containers from each other and the host system.
  4. Containers Privilege Restriction: Operate and handle containers with restricted privileges. Circumvent the operation of containers as roots. Rather, make use of cybersecurity context to limit access permissions.

6 – Containers Image Protection

  1. Hardened Base Images Utilization: Start your image with official and minimal base images from trusted sources. Moreover, ensure the images are regularly updated and that you apply the required patches.
  2. Vulnerabilities Exploits Scanning Automation: With reference to vulnerabilities exploits that may impact container images, carry out regular automated vulnerabilities scanning and management throughout the container lifecycle to reduce the exposures of such container images. Appropriate tools such as Clair, Docker Bench for Security, or Trivy can be used to scan and inspect them for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
  3. Images Signing: To ensure that images are not tampered or corrupted, we can use image signing and verification (e.g., Docker Content Trust) or hashing.

7 – Configuration Management

  1. Environment Variables: Avoid hardcoding sensitive information in your images or configuration files. Make use of secrets management tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Kubernetes Secrets.
  2. Configuration Files: Review and secure configuration files, including those used by orchestration applying tools like Kubernetes. Make sure they do not contain sensitive data or insecure settings.
  3. Misconfigurations Identification and Remediation: In order to outmaneuver misconfigurations, regularly monitor and audit your container configurations to make sure they adhere to cybersecurity best practices.

8 – Monitoring and Logging

  1. Remote Logging: Collect and analyze logs in a separate stack from the containers, the containers runtime, and the orchestration platforms to detect and investigate cybersecurity incidents.
  2. Observability: Use monitoring tools to keep an eye on the performance and security of your containers. This will help you to detect and mitigate cyber threats. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Falco and ELK Stack can be suitable.
  3. Real-Time Monitoring Set Up: Use logging, monitoring and alerting tools to detect and respond to cyber incidents in real-time.

9 – Automated Security Practices

  1. CI/CD Security: Integrate security checks into your CI/CD pipeline to catch vulnerabilities early in the development process with solutions like GitHub Advanced Security.
  2. Automate Patching: Implement automated tools to handle patching and updates for your container images, dependencies, and infrastructure. Apply concepts from the Supply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) Specification. Incrementally deploy tracks for continuous improvement.

10 – Disposable, Short-Lived Containers

  1. Microservice Architecture: Build specific and specialized single function or process applications. These containers are easier to build, test, deploy, update, and monitor. Furthermore, they will enable teams to develop and deploy their services independently.
  2. Stop and scale processes dynamically based on workload and demand: Design your microservice applications to be ephemeral, and to be spun on-demand for enhanced scalability and resilience. Constantly shutting down short-lived microservices facilitates updates and discourages persistent cyber-attacks and attempts by hackers to set footholds in your environment.

11 – Incident Response, Education and Training

  1. Playbooks and Procedures: With reference to containerized environments, develop playbooks and procedures for Incident Response Planning (IRP), and conduct regular cybersecurity drills to test your response towards container cybersecurity incidents.
  2. Team Awareness: Ensure that your team is aware and follows Containerized Applications security best practices and stays updated with the latest security trends and tools.

12 – Safe Secrets Management

  1. Store securely sensitive information and confidential client data like API keys and passwords.
  2. Use tools such as Kubernetes Secrets or HashiCorp Vault.

13 – “Shift Left” Testing Implementation

Shift-left testing is an approach to software testing and system testing in which testing is performed earlier in the lifecycle (i.e., moved to the left on the timeline or chronological sequence of the project).

  1. Integrate cybersecurity early in the development process of the containerized applications.
  2. Ensure that cybersecurity security checks are part of the CI/CD pipeline.

Conclusion

Organizations are resorting more and more to containerized applications via cloud computing for the daily operations of their businesses. Nonetheless, weaknesses within cloud computing network can be harmful for organizations using containerized applications. Consequently, what can your organizations do to foil and stymie the potential proliferation of cloud computing network vulnerabilities, and how could the future possibly unfold? The future projections for safeguarding containerized applications are evolving rapidly, with several promising trends and innovations1 on the horizon summarized as follows:

  1. Zero Trust Security Models: This approach assumes no inherent trust within the Host Network and Bridge Network, and enforces strict authentication and authorization for every access request. This strategy is particularly relevant for containerized applications and environments where traditional perimeter-based security is less effective and more at risks of cyber attacks.
  2. “Shift-Left” Security Implementation: Integrating security practices early in the development lifecycle helps identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they reach production. This approach reduces the cyber attack surface and ensures that cybersecurity is a critical part of the software development process.
  3. Enhanced Automation and AI: Automation tools and AI-driven solutions are becoming more sophisticated, enabling continuous monitoring, threat detection, and response. These technologies can help manage the complexity of containers security and respond to cyber threats in real-time.
  4. Open-Source Security Tools: The rise of open-source tools like Trivy and Falco provides accessible and powerful options for container security. Such tools offer features like vulnerabilities scanning, runtime security, and compliance checks.
  5. Improved Orchestration Security: As container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes continue to evolve, they are incorporating more robust security features. These include better default security settings, boosted Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and enhanced network policies.
  6. Confidential Computing: This emerging technology aims to protect confidential data in use by performing computations in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Confidential computing can add a supplementary layer of security for sensitive tasks and workloads operating within containerized applications.

By endorsing, adopting and harnessing the best cybersecurity practices and technologies briefly explained within this August 2024 Newsletter, your organizations can better protect their containerized applications against evolving cyber threats related to cloud computing security.

[1] Dave Wreski. LinuxSecurity. The Future of Container Security: Trends and Open-Source Tools to Watch. The 13th of July 2024. https://linuxsecurity.com/features/future-of-container-security

Resources and References

Contributions

Special thanks for the financial support of the National Research Council Canada and its Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP).

Author: Pierre Tremblay et Al.

Executive Editor: Alan Bernardi

Professional Writer & Certified Translator-Reviser: Ravi Jay Gunnoo (C.P.T. ISO 17100)

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