this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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How do you protect yourself against malicious docker containers / projects? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Simplixt@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Hi all,

as I'm running a lot of docker containers in my "self-hosted cloud", I'm also a little bit worried about getting malicious docker containers at some points. And I'm not a dev, so very limited capabilities to inspect the source code myself.

Not every docker container is a "nextcloud" image with hundred of active contributors and many eyes looking at the source code. Many Self-Hosted projects are quite small, and Github accounts can be hacked, etc. ...

What I'm doing in the moment, is:

Project selection:
- only select docker projects with high community activity on GitHub and a good track record

Docker networks:
- use separate isolated networks for every container without internet access
- if certain APIs need internet access (e.g. Geolocation data), I use an NGINX-proxy to forward this domain only (e.g. self-made outgoing application firewall)

Multiple LXC containers:
- I split my docker containers into multiple LXC instances via Proxmox, some senitive containers like Bitwarden are running on their own LXC instance

Watchtower:
- no automatic updates, but manual updates once per month and testing afterwards

Any other tips? Or am I worrying too much? ;)

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[–] ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

You are not worried too much.

Docker containers are notoriously riddled with outdated, security issue loaded content. Even reputable creators (eg. Nextcloud) only really bother with their own part of the container, but rarely release new builds of their containers when system dependencies could get updated, even less so for base images they depend on. So yes, Docker containers should always be run in a very secure environment, and doing so is by no means trivial, given that docker itself runs as root. Best advice, if you can: don't run Docker containers if you don't really have to, don't run docker containers if you are not sure what you are getting into.