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Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately containers provide about the same security as chroots too. Nothing even close to a true virtual machine with not much lower cost.

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Chroot does not provide security, just a restricted view on the file system. Container can provide pretty ok security, but fail with Kernel Exploits. VMs provide better security, but also fail with VM exploits (which there are quite regularly some).

Actually many of the VM exploits are related to qemu device emulation or paravirtualization drivers, which are closed by the use of Xen stubdom. Only very few were privilege escalation via another vector, both in kvm and in Xen. I have no idea about other hypervisors.

And in turn most QEMU vulnerabilities are closed by SELinux of your distribution enables it. Libvirt (and thus the virt-manager GUI) automatically confine each QEMU process so that it can only access the resources for that particular VM.

Seccomp, apparmor, and namespacing (especially user!) do add a lot more security than plain old chroots, but still not at the level of a VM.

But couldn't containers have been designed that way? One thing I have in mind is one of windows 10 recent features, which consist in running certain applications using the same hardware level memory protection mechanism than VMs, so that the application is safe from the OS/Kernel, and the OS/Kernel is safe from the application (can't find the exact name for this new feature unfortunately).

Containers can't be designed that way as long as the primitives to build them that way (which are mostly part of the Linux kernel) are missing. That's a core part of the article. Containers aren't an entity by themselves, they're a clever and useful combination of an existing set of capabilities.

You can design all you like, but implementation takes work.

Seccomp only landed for Docker in about 1.12

It is like that... but in Zones or Jails, not in Linux "container toolkit"

No, the Windows 10 feature he's talking about uses Hyper-V internally. It's called, unsurprisingly, Hyper-V containers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

Actually I found it. It's called Windows 10 Virtual Secure mode

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Windows-10-Virtu...

(or Windows 10 isolated user mode, which seems kind of similar)

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Mitigating-Crede...

Oh yeah that's another use of Hyper-V, somewhat similar to ARM TrustZone. It's used to implement "Credential Guard".

in Linux...

as the article shows, this is not the point for Zones and Jails.

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