A block diagram of docker is below and a description of docker daemon is here. The docker client commands talk to the docker-daemon to start one of the containers in the docker registry, or to start a process described in the command line as a new docker container. Docker provides a simple interface to linux container technology which is a lightweight VM.

A few problems with this. Who has access to the docker-daemon to control the containers ? How is integrity of the containers ensured ? How is the host protected from the code running in the containers ?

Docker recently announced a few security features in Nov DockerCon

• to lock down the container in a registry with the container image signed with a key from hardware device Yubikey; see here for a description of original issue where image checksums were not verified by docker daemon
• to scan the official container images for vulnerabilities
• to run containers with a userlevel namespace instead of one that allows root access to the host. This protects the host OS as explained here. The userlevel namespace feature has been available in LXC for over an year, but not in docker.

For access control to the docker daemon there is activity with a design doc here.

Twistlock is a container security and monitoring tool that attempts a comprehensive approach – access control to the containers, runtime scanning of files for malware signatures, vulnerability scanning, looking at network packets, so on. A recent meetup on Dec 1 discussed this product. It features integration with Kerberos and LDAP.

In terms of the kernel,  processes from all containers share the same kernel, the same networking layer. So what’s the level of isolation provided to container processes. This depends on vulnerabilities in the processes themselves – how many ports are open, whether injection attacks are possible etc. If two containers are running processes and a process from the one attacks a process from another – for example memory scraping, then Twistlock can detect it only if it can identify the offending process as malware using signature matching.

A Dockerfile is used to specify a container image using commands to spec the base os, rpms, utilities and scripts. USER specifies the userid under which the following RUN, CMD or ENTRYPOINT instruction run. EXPOSE specs a port to be opened for external access. A docker image is built from the dockerfile and contains the actual bits needed for the container to run. The image can be loaded directly or pushed to a docker registry from  which it can be pulled to clients. 

Commands:

docker build -t <imgnametag> . # build image from Dockerfile in current directory

docker run -i -t <imgnametag> /bin/bash

docker login // registry 

docker push

docker pull

docker-compose [down|up] // docker-compose.yaml

docker images

docker export <container>

docker save <image> -o imgtag.tar