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by zokier 267 days ago
I think that threat is generally overblown in these discussions. Yes, container escape is less difficult than VM escape, but it still requires major kernel 0day to do; it is by no means easy to accomplish. Doubly so if you have some decent hygiene and don't run anything as root or anything else dumb.

When was the last time we have heard container escape actually happening?

2 comments

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean the risk isn't real.

It's probably better to make some kind of risk assessment and decide whether you're willing to accept this risk for your users / business. And what you can do to mitigate this risk. The truth is the risk is always there and gets smaller as you add several isolation mechanisms to make it insignificant.

I think you meant “container escape is not as difficult as VM escape.” A malicious workload doesn’t need to be root inside the container, the attack surface is the shared linux kernel.

Not allowing root in a container might mitigate a container getting root access outside of a namespace. But if an escape succeeds the attacker could leverage yet another privilege escalation mechanism to go from non-root to root

To quote one of HN's resident infosec experts: Shared-kernel container escapes are found so often they're not even all that memorable.

More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319067