Container Security in Cloud Environments

A bstract: The widespread adoption of containers in modern software applications has introduced new challenges to security and integrity. Containers, known for their lightweight and portable nature, facilitate agile deployment across diverse environments. However, this popularity has led to security risks such as vulnerabilities in container images, misconfigurations, and insecure runtime environments. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing automated and robust security techniques integrated into continuous integration and continuous development pipelines. The work emphasizes the importance of a solid security policy, container image scanning, orchestration security, and runtime monitoring. The study also identifies specific issues faced by the DevSecOps community and proposes initial fixes to fortify container security. In the cloud environment, containers play a pivotal role in application deployment by sharing the same OS kernel, reducing resource requirements, and minimizing start-up times. Despite their advantages, weak container isolation poses security challenges, including privilege escalation and information leaks. To mitigate these concerns, the paper conducts an in-depth analysis of existing access control mechanisms for container security. It discusses challenges in architecture modeling and presents use cases for fulfilling security requirements, encompassing container, inter-container, and host protection. The work emphasizes the need for both software and hardware solutions to enhance container security. Containers have emerged as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines, supporting microservices architecture. The container market is growing rapidly, but security concerns remain a significant barrier to adoption. This paper surveys existing literature on container security, categorizing it into four use cases: protecting containers from internal applications, inter-container protection, safeguarding the host from containers, and defending containers froma malicious or semi-honest host. The analysis reveals that software-based solutions, leveraging Linux kernel features and security modules, address the first three use cases, while the last use case relies on hardware-based solutions. The paper concludes with highlighting open research problems and future directions to guide further exploration in container security.