I often read that (docker) containers are not good for security. What are secure methods of creating secure isolated environments to run questionable programs in?
I've read that standard containers are optimized for developer productivity and not security, which makes sense.
But then what would be ideal to use for security? Suppose I want to isolate environments from each other for security purposes, to run questionable programs or reduce attack surface. What are some secure solutions?
Something without the performance hit of VMs
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It is the application Docker that is not secure. Containers are. In fact Docker runs a daemon as root to wich you communicate from a client. This is what makes it less secure; running under root power. It also has a few shortcomings of privileged containers. This can be easily solved by using podman and SELinux. If you can manage to run Docker rootless, then you are magnitudes higher in security.
Do you think Podman is ready to take over Docker? My understanding is that Podman is Docker without the root requirement.
Yes it is. I've been using it for more than a year now. Works reliably. Has pod support aswel.
Great. I don't know enough to use either but I think I'm going to try lean on podman from the get go. In any case, I know that all podman commands are exactly identical to Docker, such that you can replace, say,
docker composewithpodman composeand move on with ease.With the specific exception of podman compose I completely agree. I haven’t tested it for a while but podman compose has had issues with compose file syntax in my experience. Especially with network configs.
However, I have been using “docker-compose” with podman’s docker compatible socket implementation when necessary, with great success