Hardening Linux Containers, and more especially [LXC containers](https://linuxcontainers.org/fr/lxc/introduction/), is needed to prevent a malicious user to escape your container. However, even hardened, a container can't be considered totally safe today, so don't rely solely on this article for your security! Instead, you should consider it as part of your [defense in depth strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)).
To understand how a container can be hardened, we must understand how they work under the hood.
Jessie Frazelle describes magnificently their concepts in her blog post [Setting the Record Straight: containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/containers-zones-jails-vms/).
The critical point is that containers in Linux are not a top level design like Zone in Solaris and Jails in BSD:
> A "container" is just a term people use to describe a combination of Linux [capabilities,] namespaces and cgroups. Linux [capabilities,] namespaces and cgroups ARE first class objects. NOT containers.
The challenge when it comes to hardening a LXC container, compared to other solutions, is that there is a great probability that you'll run systemd in your container. Because systemd is a powerful init system, it assumes it also requires many permissions: we will see here how to start here despite our capability hardening.
If you feel a bit lost with containers, a good start is the reading of this whitepaper by the NCCGroup: [Understanding and Hardening Linux Containers](https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/understanding-and-hardening-linux-containers/). This post is also inspired by the article written by Christian Seiler, [LXC containers without CAP\_SYS\_ADMIN under Debian Jessie](https://blog.iwakd.de/lxc-cap_sys_admin-jessie), but we'll see that, due to evolutions in the Linux kernel, the proposed configuration does not work anymore out of the box.
This command will launch your container in foreground (so you'll be able to see systemd logs at boot) and it will log many useful informations in the `/var/log/lxc/harden.log` file.
Historically, there is a huge difference between the root user (with uid 0) which bypasses any access control and the other users of the system which must pass every control. So, if you want to send an ICMP request via the `ping` command for example, you must run the command as root (with the magic of [setuid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid) to enable non privileged users to launch it). As the command is launched as root for everyone, ping can load a kernel module, change the time on your system, erase every files, etc. That's dangerous, particularly if someone finds a vulnerability in your command and uses it to do a [privilege escalation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_escalation).
A good idea would be to only allow the ping command to execute actions related to network as root, not everything. You can do that with capabilities, by giving the `CAP_NET_RAW` capability to your ping command.
But capabilities, and more precisely **capability bounding set**, can also be used to reduce the capabilities that any process of your container can inquire. Indeed, if you allow a process in your container to load kernel modules, what prevent it to load a faulty module enabling the attacker to escape the container? So, one way to prevent this catastrophic scenario is to drop `CAP_SYS_MODULE` from the capability bounding set. When you use `lxc.cap.keep` and `lxc.cap.drop`, you're modifying this capability bounding set of your container.
Let's start by displaying your current **capability bounding set**:
Here is a fragment of the function that handle the previous directive, we directly exit the function before running anything when cgroup namespaces are supported:
Developpers put this condition as, with the cgroup namespace, we can safely mount the cgroup hierarchy like any other filesystem in our LXC configuration file:
Instead, the only solution I found was to create a (simple) [LXC mount hook](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/manpages//man5/lxc.container.conf.5.html#lbBC):
```bash
#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/bin/mount-cgroup on the host
mkdir $LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd
mount cgroup $LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd \
If you want to dig the question further, you can find the whole capability list in the dedicated man page [capabilities(7)](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html) and how to use them with LXC in the LXC man page [lxc.container.conf(5)](https://linuxcontainers.org/fr/lxc/manpages//man5/lxc.container.conf.5.html#lbAV). Have fun!
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups) proposes the following definition:
> cgroups is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) of a collection of processes.
It might not be totally clear at the first read, but cgroups are two differents things:
1. A method to create groups of processus
2. A method to apply limitation, accounting, etc. on these groups
If you want to read more on this, the article [Control Groups vs. Control Groups](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/cgroups-vs-cgroups.html) by Lennart Poettering explains how systemd uses cgroups and why the distinction is crucial.
## Namespaces: isolate your system resources
Michael Kerrisk wrote an interesting [serie of articles about namespaces](https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/) on LWN. I find its definition of namespaces particularly interesting:
> The purpose of each namespace is to wrap a particular global system resource in an abstraction that makes it appear to the processes within the namespace that they have their own isolated instance of the global resource.
