Best Practice for Securing Containerized Environments

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Introduction

Containers are lightweight and portable software units that can run in a variety of computing environments. They can package an application with all of its dependencies, libraries, and even runtime tools. Containers are essentially used to allow developers to bundle their application and its dependencies so that they can operate consistently in diverse contexts. Containers provide separation for numerous applications, hence they are also deemed safe from a security standpoint. They have several advantages that make them popular among developers today, including efficiency, consistency, portability, scalability, and security.

Containers that are not appropriately secured can serve as entry points for threats into the application. Containers are constructed from images; if those images are susceptible, obsolete, or incorrectly configured, vulnerabilities are exploited, and the attacker has unauthorized access to the system or data. Aside from illegal access, containers have a number of other risks, such as malware injection.

Tools and technologies for container security

We are aware of the significance of containers; thus, let’s talk about some strategies that are essential for protecting the container from these security flaws.

Implementing Image Scanning

The fact that containers are built from images means that the security of images is of the utmost importance. Images that are utilized in containers may have misconfigurations, obsolete software or other security flaws that allow an adversary to take advantage of those images. If the images are exploited, then the container will be exploited by default as well. This technique will be very beneficial in identifying the image flaws before they can get deployed into the production container, hence reducing the risk that a company is exposed to.

In order to ensure that images are free from vulnerabilities and do not include any security flaws, it is vital to check photos on a frequent basis. To do this, we can make advantage of an image scanning method. We have a couple of applications, such as Clair and Tricy, as well as a large number of open source tools that are…