Container Virtualization Security

Containers use the host operating system as their base and not the hypervisor.

Container virtualization security.

A key property of containers is a more porous segmentation boundary relative to os virtualization. Learn about a strategy for scaling container security across organizations of any size. Although there are many advantages to moving to virtualization via containers architects must address challenges and associated risks in the following six areas. The threats highlighted in niap base virtualization protection profile apply equally to containers virtualized storage and sdn.

Such instances called containers lxc solaris containers docker zones solaris containers virtual private servers partitions virtual environments ves virtual kernels dragonfly bsd or jails freebsd jail or chroot jail may look like real. In fact according to a forrestor research study 53 of enterprises deploying containers cite security as top concern. As the threats are the same the counter measures i e. Containers and virtual machines each have their uses in fact many deployments of containers use virtual machines as the host operating system rather than running directly on the hardware especially when running containers in the cloud.

Instead multiple isolated systems called containers. Cons of virtualization via containers. Os level virtualization is an operating system paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances. Containers are often compared to virtual machines vms because both technologies enable significant compute efficiencies by allowing multiple types of software linux or windows based to be run in a single environment.

In the same line one must bear in mind that the security of the server hosting the containers is equally important as that of the container itself. If we traverse the current market scenario it becomes clear that container based virtualization is rapidly gaining momentum across large scale enterprises as well as smes. This is likely due to the fact that vm s have reached maturity in their deployment and the attack surfaces are fairly well understood. Application containers by contrast have different properties some of which bolster security and depending on usage some that can undermine it.

Security functions that counters the threats are also the same for the aforementioned virtualized systems. Containerization also called container based virtualization and application containerization is an os level virtualization method for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire vm for each application. Rather than virtualizing the hardware which requires full virtualized operating system images for each guest containers virtualize the. This topic discusses some of the key similarities and differences between containers and virtual machines and when you might want to use each.

Container virtualization often referred as operating system virtualization is more than just a different kind of hypervisor.