Every time I try to install Docker there's a warning that being in the "docker" group is equivalent to having root access.
You should probably know about this workaround by now.
You should probably know about this workaround by now.
As for Docker, I would assume everyone who ever tried to bind-mount a volume for writing from inside the container (on Linux*) then were surprised to see root-owned files in their bind-mounted directory. For me personally, that was the moment I realized that containers, by default, have root access to the filesystem. No written warning serves better than the need to chown some root-owned files.
* Not on macOS. On macOS Docker basically runs in a VM, and there's no root access to the host filesystem from what I understand.
[edit: formatting]
So, you may get filesystem access inside the VM. Breaking out of the VM may be a different matter.
Conversely, docker containers don't actually exist on MacOs. Docker desktop is merely a way to emulate docker on apple hardware.
> Most of us install Docker just to run a project locally
I'll admit, systemd is a bit more annoying, but the main annoyance is that there aren't the pre-built images that you can just set and go. That same capability exists with systemd (via `importctl` and `machined`), but those configurations don't already exist. But on the plus side, I've been working with systemd since pre-LLM days and I feel that they are pretty good at dealing with these configurations[0]. Now, with that out of the way...
Systemd already is working with your OS. So you get nice things like virtual machines (`systemd-vmspawn`), containers (`systemd-nspawn`), and portables[1] (`systemd-portabled`) (not to mention `homed`!). I've found these to be fairly easy to setup and quite natural if you're already used to the linux ecosystem. I've never been great at docker, but these have felt much more natural to me. So different strokes for different folks. There's definitely a learning curve, but that's also true for docker or any other container system. Importantly, I find security easier to handle with systemd because I can use `systemd-analyze` and the control settings are almost identical across VMs, spawns, and portables. So makes for less learning and greater control.
Definitely not for everybody, but I think is also a tool that's underappreciated.
[0] And I don't feel this way about bash scripting! The advantage here is that these systemd configuration files are fairly boilerplate. Enough that I stash templates in my dotfiles and copy paste them when I build new services, timers, machines, whatever. So perfect type of LLM task. 90% of the time. But hey, we're also on HN and I'm talking to the nerds. Systemd isn't for everyone
[1] https://systemd.io/PORTABLE_SERVICES/ also see https://github.com/systemd/portable-walkthrough Portables are actually often what people want with what they're doing with docker.
EDIT: I very frequently will spawn a machine to run a program that's on a different base distro. Not because I can't run/don't know how to run debs or rpms on arch based distros (I do), but because frankly, it is often easier to just spawn a container after I've already made the first image (cloning images is trivial).
But what is the relevance here? In what way is it a replacement for docker?
> In what way is it a replacement for docker?
These are container tools offered by systemd.
> Warning
> The docker group grants root-level privileges to the user. For details on how this impacts security in your system, see Docker Daemon Attack Surface.
Huge design mistake if you ask me.
you can also just not run docker as root and not add normal users to the docker group
No. Containers are a slight improvement over the .tar.gz software distribution method we had a few decades ago.
(And I mean "slight" literally - a Docker container is just a .tar.gz with a bundled bash script that runs in a chroot.)
On the plus side, once we outlaw them we'll shut down the ability for conspiratorial thinking to spread easily and the world will slowly heal from the last couple of decades (the previous one in particular).
Hooray! We're finally doing something about the harms of social media. Smash your computer today!
not humans being humans,
not the people at the highest echelons of society being corrupt (Epstein called).
It’s the people trying to piece that evil together so they know what to tell their kids - they’re the problem.
Sure.
`/usr/bin/sudo`?
$ which() { echo foo; }
$ \which
foo
`command which` wouldn't have been the built-in
Instead of having "root" and "user", both of these provide sets of permissions that can be granted to apps.
In this case, SELinux would've stopped this. Codex could've still relabelled the files when mounting but this can be blocked for sensitive directories like /etc.
Containers don't provide good isolation and tend to be trivial to break out of.
I think not, virtualization has such low overhead now that there's just no excuse. It's generally trivial to switch from containers to VMs.
I recently took the risk there by having it run xattr commands to fix some MacOS bug with Tahoe that broke auto update for what seems like all software.
> Nothing short of sandboxing everything or just never using AI agents
But the problem was not the AI agent.
Sandboxing is quite neat though; I remember on GoboLinux the idea of AlienFS to have every application run in a sandboxed manner, so it would only see other programs it needs, but never more than that. I consider it a better engineering focus to have this as minimal layer, even outside of security-related concerns.
Using open-source (non-proprietary) software won’t necessarily save you either. XZ is open-source and it was basically dumb luck that we weren’t all infected. Same with the myriad exploits to NPM.
There's your mistake.
(Akshually using Docker is the real mistake, but that ship has sailed, no fixing these people now.)
not reading terms might see copyright being broken.
not reading manuals and warnings will get all your livelihood stolen by hackers.
different ballgame different focus.
> A lot of us don’t get a choice
Wise advice and facts... the terrible state of our industry
99% of the time it just read the man or some other form of documentation
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...
How much system resources does it need to work smoothly? I was also thinking about doing something similar.
The tragedy is of course that when security and usability collide, 80/20 rule will apply where 80% of people will pick usability over security. I have worked with many with the title >= "Senior Engineers" who saw that page, read the explanation, and still had no idea what the ramifications of their changes were. "Yeah sure it said any user in the docker group will be able to get root on the host, but aren't containers isolated?"
Ironically that’s how Docker works on every platform where it’s running a non-native OS. On macOS that’s how all images are run. Linux on Linux is the only Docker combination that is particularly problematic from a security perspective.
Virtualisation has advanced greatly since docker was introduced, if your running in local hardware that’s supports virtualisation, Docker should be running images fully virtualised. There is no good reason to use the OS kernel for most use cases as the performance impact is negligible. If you need kernel access there are better options, like systemd containers.
I run a personal server for few open source applications for personal use. I was thinking with all the supply chain attacks, and how carelessly I run `docker pull`s to update things I should probably consider hardening things a bit. I thought before jumping to full virtualization with Kata I can easily try gvisor/runsc first. Only to realize that DNS resolution is completely different with runsc vs runc and had to switch back.
Another sticking issue with virtualization is resource allocation. With namespace docker you can easily oversubscribe each container CPU/memory and rely on the single kernel letting individual containers burst as needed. With full virtualization this is still a big problem. Even with balloon devices and dynamic memory and CPU etc, the resource allocation is still not optimal. On a basic 8 core/16GB machine you can run 1 or 2 dozen services and things generally workout fine. Trying to run each of those in a virtualized VM you suddly can maybe run 6 or 7 maybe. There is no way to tell VM 3 kernel to drop its file system cache because VM 6 needs to load a large file in memory. Even if you script it out, now VM 3 is slow because it dropped all its cache while VM 6 finished processing 3 hours ago. These are not unsolvable problems, but despite how far virtualization has come, are still friction points.
Not to mention issues like sharing hardware devices (GPUs, disks, USB devices etc) between multiple VMs