What are the challenges in securing containers?
While containers have many benefits (such as faster software delivery ), they are not without their challenges, primarily because they require security measures (they lack self-defense capabilities). This is because containers access the hardware through a hosted operating system (OS). This means that a single container can have multiple base container images, which increases the attack surface and creates some challenges.
The first is container misconfiguration , where developers forget to configure and use default container configurations that have a number of drawbacks, such as opening insecure ports that may not be appropriate for your application, leaking credentials such as passwords and authentication tokens , and over-granting container execution privileges (running as root). If these defaults are not reverted, they open up attack surfaces.