Container Security Guide

This guide provides a high-level walkthrough of the container security measures available in OpenShift Container Platform, including solutions for the host layer, the container and orchestration layer, and the build and application layer. This guide contains the following information:

Containers package an application and all its dependencies into a single image that can be promoted from development, to test, to production, without change.

Containers provide consistency across environments and multiple deployment targets: physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), and private or public cloud.

Some of the benefits of using containers include:

Further Reading

This guide describes the key elements of security for each layer of the container solution stack, while also showing how OpenShift Container Platform can be used to to create, deploy, and manage containers at scale, with security in mind at every stage and every layer.

Further Reading

Containers enable you to simplify multi-tenancy deployments by deploying multiple applications on a single host, using the kernel and the docker runtime to spin up each container.

You must have an operating system (OS) that can secure the host kernel and secure containers from each other. In Linux, containers are just a special type of process, so securing containers is the same as securing any running process. Containers should run as a non-root user. Dropping the privilege level or creating containers with the least amount of privileges possible is recommended.

Because OpenShift Container Platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and RHEL Atomic Host, the following concepts apply by default to any deployed OpenShift Container Platform cluster and are at the core of what make containers secure on the platform.

Further Reading

Traditional virtualization also enables multi-tenancy, but in a very different way from containers. Virtualization relies on a hypervisor spinning up guest virtual machines (VMs), each of which has its own operating system (OS), as well as the running application and its dependencies.

With VMs, the hypervisor isolates the guests from each other and from the host kernel. Fewer individuals and processes have access to the hypervisor, reducing the attack surface on the physical server. That said, security must still be monitored: one guest VM may be able to use hypervisor bugs to gain access to another VM or the host kernel. And, when the OS needs patching, it must be patched on all guest VMs using that OS.

Containers can be run inside guest VMs, and there may be use cases where this is desirable. For example, you may be deploying a traditional application in a container, perhaps in order to lift-and-shift an application to the cloud. However, container multi-tenancy on a single host provides a more lightweight, flexible, and easier-to-scale deployment solution. This deployment model is particularly appropriate for cloud-native applications.

Further Reading

Applications and infrastructures are composed of readily available components, many of which are open source packages such as, the Linux operating system, JBoss Web Server, PostgreSQL, and Node.js.

Containerized versions of these packages are also available, However, you need to know where the packages originally came from, who built them, and whether there is any malicious code inside them.

Some questions to answer include:

Further Reading

Container scanning tools can leverage continuously updated vulnerability databases to ensure that you always have the latest information on known vulnerabilities for your container content. The list of known vulnerabilities constantly evolves; you must check the contents of your container images when you first download them and continue to track vulnerability status over time for all of your approved and deployed images.

RHEL provides a pluggable API to support multiple scanners. You can also use Red Hat CloudForms with OpenSCAP to scan container images for security issues. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Guide for general information on OpenSCAP in RHEL, and the Red Hat CloudForms Policies and Profiles Guide for specifics on OpenSCAP integration.

OpenShift Container Platform enables you to leverage such scanners with your CI/CD process. For example, you can integrate static code analysis tools that test for security flaws in your source code and software composition analysis tools that identify open source libraries in order to provide metadata on those libraries such as known vulnerabilities. This is covered in more detail in Build Process.

OpenShift Container Platform makes use of object annotations to extend functionality. External tools, such as vulnerability scanners, may annotate image objects with metadata to summarize results and control pod execution. This section describes the recognized format of this annotation so it may be reliably used in consoles to display useful data to users.

quality.images.openshift.io/<qualityType>.<providerId>: {}

quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.blackduck: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.jfrog: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/license.blackduck: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.openscap: {}

{
  "name": "OpenSCAP",
  "description": "OpenSCAP vulnerability score",
  "timestamp": "2016-09-08T05:04:46Z",
  "reference": "https://www.open-scap.org/930492",
  "compliant": true,
  "scannerVersion": "1.2",
  "summary": [
    { "label": "critical", "data": "4", "severityIndex": 3, "reference": null },
    { "label": "important", "data": "12", "severityIndex": 2, "reference": null },
    { "label": "moderate", "data": "8", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null },
    { "label": "low", "data": "26", "severityIndex": 0, "reference": null }
  ]
}

{
  "name": "Red Hat Container Catalog",
  "description": "Container health index",
  "timestamp": "2016-09-08T05:04:46Z",
  "reference": "https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016:1566",
  "compliant": null,
  "scannerVersion": "1.2",
  "summary": [
    { "label": "Health index", "data": "B", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null }
  ]
}

$ oc annotate image <image> \
    quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.redhatcatalog='{ \
    "name": "Red Hat Container Catalog", \
    "description": "Container health index", \
    "timestamp": "2016-09-08T05:04:46Z", \
    "compliant": null, \
    "scannerVersion": "1.2", \
    "reference": "https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016:1566", \
    "summary": "[ \
      { "label": "Health index", "data": "B", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null } ]" }'

annotations:
  images.openshift.io/deny-execution: true

$ curl -X PATCH \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/merge-patch+json" \
  https://<openshift_server>:8443/oapi/v1/images/<image_id> \
  --data '{ <image_annotation> }'

{
"metadata": {
  "annotations": {
    "quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.redhatcatalog":
       "{ 'name': 'Red Hat Container Catalog', 'description': 'Container health index', 'timestamp': '2016-09-08T05:04:46Z', 'compliant': null, 'reference': 'https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016:1566', 'summary': [{'label': 'Health index', 'data': '4', 'severityIndex': 1, 'reference': null}] }"
    }
  }
}

There are tools you can use to scan and track the contents of your downloaded and deployed container images. However, there are many public sources of container images. When using public container registries, you can add a layer of protection by using trusted sources.

Consuming security updates is particularly important when managing immutable containers. Immutable containers are containers that will never be changed while running. When you deploy immutable containers, you do not step into the running container to replace one or more binaries; you rebuild and redeploy an updated container image.

Red Hat certified images are:

The list of known vulnerabilities is constantly evolving, so you must track the contents of your deployed container images, as well as newly downloaded images, over time. You can use Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSAs) to alert you to any newly discovered issues in Red Hat certified container images, and direct you to the updated image.

Further Reading

Red Hat provides certified containers for Red Hat products and partner offerings via the Red Hat Registry, which is a public container registry hosted by Red Hat at registry.access.redhat.com. The Red Hat Container Catalog enables you to identify bug fix or security advisories associated with container images provided in the Red Hat Registry.

Container content is monitored for vulnerabilities by Red Hat and updated regularly. When Red Hat releases security updates, such as fixes to glibc, Drown, or Dirty Cow, any affected container images are also rebuilt and pushed to the Red Hat Registry.

Red Hat uses a "health index" for security risk with containers provided through the Red Hat Container Catalog. These containers consume software provided by Red Hat and the errata process, so old, stale containers are insecure whereas new, fresh containers are more secure.

To illustrate the age of containers, the Red Hat Container Catalog uses a grading system. A freshness grade is a measure of the oldest and most severe security errata available for an image. "A" is more up-to-date than "F". See Container Health Index grades as used inside the Red Hat Container Catalog for more details on this grading system.

Further Reading

OpenShift Container Platform includes the OpenShift Container Registry, a private registry that runs integrated with the platform that you can use to manage your container images. The OpenShift Container Registry provides role-based access controls that allow you to manage who can pull and push which container images.

OpenShift Container Platform also supports integration with other private registries you may already be using.

Further Reading

In a container environment, the software build process is the stage in the life cycle where application code is integrated with the required runtime libraries. Managing this build process is key to securing the software stack.

Using OpenShift Container Platform as the standard platform for container builds enables you to guarantee the security of the build environment. Adhering to a "build once, deploy everywhere" philosophy ensures that the product of the build process is exactly what is deployed in production.

It is also important to maintain the immutability of your containers. You should not patch running containers, but rebuild and redeploy them.

You can use source-to-Image (S2I) to combine source code and base images. Builder images make use of S2I to enable your development and operations teams to collaborate on a reproducible build environment.

When developers commit code with Git for an application using build images, OpenShift Container Platform can perform the following functions:

You can use OpenShift Container Registry to manage access to final images. Both S2I and native build images are automatically pushed to the OpenShift Container Registry.

In addition to the included Jenkins for CI, you can also integrate your own build / CI environment with OpenShift Container Platform using RESTful APIs, as well as use any API-compliant image registry.

Further Reading

In some scenarios, build operations require credentials to access dependent resources, but it is undesirable for those credentials to be available in the final application image produced by the build. You can define input secrets for this purpose.

For example, when building a Node.js application, you can set up your private mirror for Node.js modules. In order to download modules from that private mirror, you have to supply a custom .npmrc file for the build that contains a URL, user name, and password. For security reasons, you do not want to expose your credentials in the application image.

Using this example scenario, you can add an input secret to a new BuildConfig:

Further Reading

You can design your container image management and build process to use container layers so that you can separate control.

For example, an operations team manages base images, while architects manage middleware, runtimes, databases, and other solutions. Developers can then focus on application layers and just write code.

Because new vulnerabilities are identified daily, you need to proactively check container content over time. To do this, you should integrate automated security testing into your build or CI process. For example:

Your CI process should include policies that flag builds with issues discovered by security scans so that your team can take appropriate action to address those issues. You should sign your custom built containers to ensure that nothing is tampered with between build and deployment.

Further Reading

If something happens during the build process, or if a vulnerability is discovered after an image has been deployed, you can use tooling for automated, policy-based deployment. You can use triggers to rebuild and replace images instead of patching running containers, which is not recommended.

For example, you build an application using three container image layers: core, middleware, and applications. An issue is discovered in the core image and that image is rebuilt. After the build is complete, the image is pushed to the OpenShift Container Registry. OpenShift Container Platform detects that the image has changed and automatically rebuilds and deploys the application image, based on the defined triggers. This change incorporates the fixed libraries and ensures that the production code is identical to the most current image.

The oc set triggers command can be used to set a deployment trigger for a deployment configuration. For example, to set an ImageChangeTrigger in a deployment configuration called frontend:

$ oc set triggers dc/frontend \
    --from-image=myproject/origin-ruby-sample:latest \
    -c helloworld

Further Reading

The Secret object type provides a mechanism to hold sensitive information such as passwords, OpenShift Container Platform client configuration files, dockercfg files, and private source repository credentials. Secrets decouple sensitive content from pods. You can mount secrets into containers using a volume plug-in or the system can use secrets to perform actions on behalf of a pod.

For example, to add a secret to your deployment configuration using the web console so that it can access a private image repository:

ConfigMaps are similar to secrets, but are designed to support working with strings that do not contain sensitive information. The ConfigMap object holds key-value pairs of configuration data that can be consumed in pods or used to store configuration data for system components such as controllers.

Further Reading

You can use security context constraints (SCCs) to define a set of conditions that a pod (a collection of containers) must run with in order to be accepted into the system.

Some aspects that can be managed by SCCs include:

If you have the required permissions, you can adjust the default SCC policies to be more permissive.

Further Reading

You can integrate your own continuous deployment (CD) tooling with OpenShift Container Platform.

By leveraging CI/CD and OpenShift Container Platform, you can automate the process of rebuilding the application to incorporate the latest fixes, testing, and ensuring that it is deployed everywhere within the environment.

APIs are key to automating container management at scale. APIs are used to:

Further Reading

OpenShift Container Platform has multiple components within its framework that use REST-based HTTPS communication leveraging encryption via TLS certificates. OpenShift Container Platform’s Ansible-based installer configures these certificates during installation. There are some primary components that generate this traffic:

openshift_master_named_certificates=[{"certfile": "/path/on/host/to/custom1.crt", "keyfile": "/path/on/host/to/custom1.key", "cafile": "/path/on/host/to/custom-ca1.crt"}]

OpenShift Container Platform uses software-defined networking (SDN) to provide a unified cluster network that enables communication between containers across the cluster.

Using network namespaces, you can isolate pod networks. Each pod gets its own IP and port range to bind to, thereby isolating pod networks from each other on the node. Pods from different projects cannot send packets to or receive packets from pods and services of a different project. You can use this to isolate developer, test and production environments within a cluster.

OpenShift Container Platform also provides the ability to control egress traffic using either a router or firewall method. For example, you can use IP whitelisting to control database access.

Further Reading

OpenShift Container Platform enables you to segment network traffic on a single cluster to make multi-tenant clusters that isolate users, teams, applications, and environments.

For example, to isolate a project network in the cluster and vice versa, run:

$ oc adm pod-network isolate-projects <project1> <project2>

In the above example, all of the pods and services in <project1> and <project2> can not access any pods and services from other non-global projects in the cluster and vice versa.

Containers are useful for both stateless and stateful applications. Protecting attached storage is a key element of securing stateful services.

OpenShift Container Platform provides plug-ins for multiple types of storage, including NFS, AWS Elastic Block Stores (EBS), GCE Persistent Disks, GlusterFS, iSCSI, RADOS (Ceph) and Cinder. Data in transit is encrypted via HTTPS for all OpenShift Container Platform components communicating with each other.

You can mount PersistentVolume (PV) on a host in any way supported by your storage type. Different types of storage have different capabilities and each PV’s access modes are set to the specific modes supported by that particular volume.

For example, NFS can support multiple read/write clients, but a specific NFS PV might be exported on the server as read-only. Each PV has its own set of access modes describing that specific PV’s capabilities, such as ReadWriteOnce, ReadOnlyMany, and ReadWriteMany.

Further Reading

For shared storage providers like NFS, Ceph, and Gluster, the PV registers its group ID (GID) as an annotation on the PV resource. Then, when the PV is claimed by the pod, the annotated GID is added to the supplemental groups of the pod, giving that pod access to the contents of the shared storage.

Further Reading

For block storage providers like AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS), GCE Persistent Disks, and iSCSI, OpenShift Container Platform uses SELinux capabilities to secure the root of the mounted volume for non-privileged pods, making the mounted volume owned by and only visible to the container with which it is associated.

Further Reading