From what I have seen, rootless podman seems to take more effort (even if marginal) than rootful one. I want to make a more informed decision for the containers, so I would like to ask.
- What is a rootless podman good for? How much does it help in terms of security, and does it have other benefits?
- One of the benefits commonly mentioned is for when container is breached. Then, running container on sudo-capable user would give no security benefits. Does it mean I should run podman services on a non-privileged user?
Thank you!
How would a rogue container be able to access the root directory of the host? Wouldn’t it just be able to access the data on the docker volumes? Thank you.
In an ideal world, sure, but all software has bugs (example vulnerabilities here). Proper security design doesn’t ask “how can X happen?” but “what if X happens?” If you break out of a docker container, you have root access to the system because the docker daemon runs as root.
With podman, there is no root docker daemon, so you’d also need privilege escalation in addition to breaking out of the container.
With root permission you can do chroot.
Can you provide the required arguments for chroot? I’ve just opened the bash shell of a running container (docker exec -it mycontainer bash) and tried to “break out” using “chroot /”. I can’t access any files of the host.