this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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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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[–] steph@lemmy.clueware.org 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

All recent CPUs have native virtualization support, so there's close to no performance hit on VMs.

That being said, even a VM is subject to exploits and malicious code could break out of the VM down to its hypervisor.

The only secure way of running suspicious programs starts with an air-gaped machine, a cheap hdd/ssd that will go straight under the hammer as soon as testing is complete. And I'd be wondering even after that if maybe the BIOS might have been compromised.

On a lower level of paranoia and/or threat, a VM on an up-to-date hypervisor with a snapshot taken before doing anything questionable should be enough. You'd then only have to fear a zero day exploit of said hypervisor.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Each VM needs a complete OS, though. Even at 100% efficiency, that's still a whole kernel+userspace just idling around and a bunch of caches, loaded libraries, etc. Docker is much more efficient in that regard.

And LXC even more efficient in that regard.

Docker does load a bunch of stuff that most people don't need for their project.

I don't know why LXC is always the red-headed stepchild. It works wonderfully.