this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)

Self-Hosted Main

21 readers
1 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

For Example

We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.

Useful Lists

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
communick@selfhosted.forum
3
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
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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? ;)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] nukacola2022@alien.top 2 points 1 year ago

Since you are using LXC/LXD, make sure that AppArmor is enabled on the host and ensure that a configuration profile exists (should be a decent default one available) that blocks the containers from reading things like the /etc/passwd file.

I personally run all containers in centos/alma/fedora systems specifically to take advantage of the strong SELinux-container policies.

Other things you can do would be to rebuild public images, patch them, and save them to your private registry. I find that not all container maintainers patch as aggressively as I would like. Furthermore, you can look into running containers as non root and use a non root “daemon” like Podman instead of Docker.