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Isolating Containers from Container Attacks

All Alone

Article from ADMIN 94/2026

By Stefan Mutschler

Container escapes have become a popular attack with the rise in container deployments. We show you how to harden the underlying infrastructure to keep your applications and host system secure.

In recent years, containers have become some of the most important building blocks of today's IT infrastructures. They are relatively frugal in terms of system resources, are easy to manage, are flexible, and enable quick development, deployment, and scaling of applications. Whether in cloud environments, in a DevOps context, or in traditional data centers, containers are everywhere you look. But as their importance grows, so does the interest of attackers.

The container escape – that is, the moment an attacker breaches the isolation layer and gains access to the host system or other containers – is a particularly critical scenario that not only jeopardizes the security of an individual application, but often that of the entire underlying infrastructure. To operate your containers securely, you need to understand the basic technology of how a container escape works and the targeted actions you need to take to mitigate the risk. A look at real-world cases from the recent past offers insights into how container environments can be hardened so that even the most sophisticated escape techniques fail.

Isolated Applications

To the outside world, containers appear almost like small, separate virtual machines (VMs) with their own filesystems, processes, and networks. In reality, though, they all run on the host's operating system kernel. The impression of strict separation arises from several Linux kernel mechanisms that interact and together create a kind of virtual environment (Figure 1).

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