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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

If you're running untrusted code in your container, you've pretty much already lost.

Containers are useful for deployment and configuration, they are not a robustly secure sandbox. For that you still need to go with a VM.

No cloud provider will offer to run your containers alongside other customer's containers, on a shared kernel. Your containers always run within your own VM.

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No, it is levels of security, not a white/black issue. For some customers and providers, containered processes are enough isolation. For many small businesses, even shared hosting with chroot is enough.

Generally speaking, Xen or Firecracker VMs do have smaller attack surface than containered processes on a shared Linux kernel. But configuration and exposed capabilities matter - it is possible to have container better secured than a VM (e.g. minimal Zones/jails env + correct MAC config vs. general Qemu/VMware VM with many default legacy devices and bad/no MAC config).

Motivated attackers can escape even these VMs. So they are not a magical solution.

Common hypervisors are too big and buggy to be pronounced as security panacea. From time to time, VM escapes resurface to public but most are probably guarded and being exploited in quiet. As we know after Spectre and Meltdown, standard computing technology is buggy/bugged all the way down to hardware.

If you want really "robustly secure" server environment, such do exist: for example, separation kernels like the L4 family or the Green Hills INTEGRITY systems. But for web apps, almost nobody bothers.

> No cloud provider will offer to run your containers alongside other customer's containers, on a shared kernel. Your containers always run within your own VM.

Joyent does - via SmartOS zones.

> From time to time, VM escapes resurface to public but most are probably guarded and being exploited in quiet. As we know after Spectre and Meltdown, standard computing technology is buggy/bugged all the way down to hardware.

To my knowledge there has never been a successful escape from the VMs offered by AWS, GCP, or Azure. That would be a pretty big story.

> If you want really "robustly secure" server environment, such do exist: for example, separation kernels like the L4 family or the Green Hills INTEGRITY systems. But for web apps, almost nobody bothers.

What's the reason none of the major cloud providers use seL4? Missing features? By seL4's own account their performance is exceptional, but perhaps its performance can't compete against a hardware-assisted system like AWS Nitro?

> Joyent does - via SmartOS zones.

Thanks I'd not heard of that.

You won't hear much about the VM escapes in those clouds because there is strong incentive for almost everyone to be quiet about them and patch as soon as possible so there "isn't a story". Some researchers do want to make a name for themselves and publish before the patch, but those are minority. And publicly attacking a big corporation is quite risky so they prefer presenting the bug as general problem in the technology. But the bugs in hypervisors exist, see CVE's for Xen for the past decade.