Access Security Policy Generation for Containers as a Cloud Service

• Published in: SN computer science Vol. 4; no. 6; p. 748
• Main Authors: Zhu, Hui, Gehrmann, Christian, Roth, Paula
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Nature Singapore 01.11.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Access control; Behavior; Classification; Cloud computing; Cloud Computing and Services Science; Computer Imaging; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Containerization; Containers; Data Structures and Information Theory; Design; Information Systems and Communication Service; Linux; Operating systems; Original Research; Pattern Recognition and Graphics; Security; Software; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Vision; Web services; AppArmor; Container; Docker; Security-as-a-service
• ISSN: 2661-8907; 2662-995X; 2661-8907
• DOI: 10.1007/s42979-023-02186-1

The rapid development of containerization technology comes with remarkable benefits for developers and operation teams. Container solutions allow building very flexible software infrastructures. Although lots of efforts have been devoted to enhancing containerization security, containerized environments still have a huge attack surface. Completely avoiding severe security issues have so far not been possible to achieve. However, the security problems due to vulnerabilities in for instance kernels, can be largely reduced if the container privileges are as restricted as possible. Mandatory access control is an efficient way to achieve this using for instance AppArmor. As manual AppArmor generation is tedious and error prone, automatic generation of protection profile is necessary. In previous research, a new tool for tight AppArmor profile generation was presented. In this paper we show how, in a system setting, such tool can be combined with container service testing, to provide a cloud based container service for automatic AppArmore profile generation. We present solutions for profile generation both for centrally collected and generated container logs and for log collection through a local agent. To evaluate the effectiveness of the profile generation service, we enable it on a widely used containerized web service to generate profiles and test them with real-world attacks. We generate an exploit database with 11 exploits harmful to the tested web service. These exploits are sifted from the 56 exploits of Exploit-db targeting the tested web service’s software. We launch these exploits on the web service protected by the profile. The results show that the proposed profile generation service improves the test web service’s overall security a lot compared to using the default Docker security profile. This together with the very user friendly and robust principle for setting up and running the service, clearly indicates that the approach is an important step for improving container security in real deployments.