| > They keep claiming their stuff is more secure; is that wrong? The docker daemon has a large surface area and also has fairly hefty privileges. It's a juicy target of attack. A platform can take various actions to further lock down the runtime with AppArmor or SELinux, but out of the box you wind up hearing the motto that "containers don't contain". Notably, the docker daemon has too many responsibilities. It's a builder. It's a shipper. It's a runner. It's everything to everyone, which makes for a convenient installation process but means that a subversion of any of these functions potentially allows someone to drill sideways into one of the others. > Being beholden to a desperate competitor isn't just marketing; it could be a matter of survival and a strategic response seems reasonable. I'm prepared to go with: the engineers thought it was a good idea and product management didn't gainsay them. It's been a common theme from multiple tech companies in the past year or two. Google, Amazon, Red Hat, Pivotal (which is where I work) have all been chipping away at breaking off parts of the daemon's responsibilities. |
Unfortunately, I don't agree with this whole "it must be more secure because we broke it into bits" argument. That alone is not sufficient in order to increase security. The vast majority of the code in libpod/cri-o is very similar to (generate a config and pass it to runc) or copied directly from Docker (containers/storage, with containers/image honestly having quite a few more problems than Docker's image parsers). When I found CVE-2018-15664, not only was the libpod/cri-o stack also vulnerable but it was as vulnerable as Docker was more than 5 years ago when I fixed the original security flaw in 2014. I feel bad saying this (I don't want to blame the folks working on this, who I do respect immensely) but it really should be a serious consideration if you want to put "more secure" in your advertising.
This is why I argued for several years that we should add OCI runtime (and custom storage driver) support to rkt instead of having to redesign everything (and since we started with cri-o instead of libpod, getting rid of the daemon was a pain there too). But of course, like every other discussion I've had with Dan Walsh, it was brushed away. Whatever.
I do really like the folks behind the project. I just wish we'd spent our collective energy on improving something that already existed instead of repeating mistakes pointlessly. I'm definitely not a fan of Docker's politics either (and at the very least nobody from the cri-o/libpod project has sent me abusive emails calling me stupid and "brainwashed by Red Hat" for criticizing their project's governance model -- which Solomon Hykes did in the past when he was still the CTO of Docker).
Disclaimer: I work for SUSE and maintain runc, and have worked on containers for a depressingly long period of time. Obviously the above are my views not those of my employer (who ships both Docker and cri-o, and my team maintains it in our products). I'm just tired of all the fucking drama.