I came across a very interesting post this morning on using Play With Docker (PWD) to let people try out applications directly from your GitHub repository. If you’ve not tried out Play With Docker before (or it’s companion site, Play with Kubernetes), they’re very useful resources which let you try things out in disposable Docker and Kubernetes environments. Handy for training courses amongst other things.

Based on the Kubernetes security reviews I’ve done, one of the most problematic areas for clusters is user authentication. Whilst Kubernetes provides a wide range of options, it lacks the “traditional” user database that you might expect to see with a multi-user networked system. Using external OIDC or webhook providers is often complex, so many clusters make use of the in-built authentication options which are :-

One of the key elements of the success of Docker is the availability of Docker Hub, which provides an effective “app store” of pre-build Docker images with a huge variety of pre-installed software. Everything from Databases, to CRM software to hacking tools is easily available at the drop of a docker run command.

Following on from looking at katacontainers and gVisor, I thought it might be interesting to look at the containerd project and the idea of using containerd and runc without docker to run containers. Looking round the documentation, I couldn’t find a good look at getting containerd and runc setup together without installing Docker, so lets do that.

This is the second part of a series, taking a brief look at some alternate container runtimes, which can be used with Docker and Kubernetes, the first part is here.

As part of some talks I did for the recent NCC Con, I started looking at the gVisor project from Google (nothing like having to write a presentation to provide motivation!).

Yesterday I noticed a tweet from Derek Abdine about the Rapid7 OpenData collections which are free to access datasets of various types, so thought I’d have a quick look at something I’ve been meaning to for a while, information disclosed via SSL certificates in Internet facing Kubernetes clusters.

A common task in any security review, is auditing user access control, as excessive numbers of privileged users are a common theme, and privileged access a common point of attack.

There’s a number of steps needed to get all this setup properly, but at the end of it you should be able to run Linux and Windows containers on a Windows host from WSL bash…

Kubernetes network policies are a useful security feature which allow for traffic into and (sometimes) out of pods to be restricted.