Thanks for the in depth clarification. I had in mind how quick re-installing a system was after a failure but indeed security itself is fundamental.
So to try to better gauge the risk here when you say
container escapes and VM escapes are not impossible.
what level of efforts are you talking about here? State level 0-day required with team of actual humans trying to hack? Script kiddy downloading Kali and playing for 1h? Something totally automated perpetually scanning the Internet in minutes and owning you without even caring for who you are?
I did read about blue pilling years ago (damn just checked, nearly 20 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software) ) but it seems that since it’s the 1 thing solutions like Docker, Podman, etc and VM propers (and then the underlying hardware) have to worry about, it feels like it would be like trying to break-in by focus on a lock rather than breaking a window, namely the “hard” part of the setup.
Yeah, containerization does make it much easier to just throw away the base system and start fresh. This way, you don’t have to worry about possibly straying the recommended upgrade path and accidentally breaking something.
More code adds complexity, complexity leads to more bugs, more bugs means more vulnerabilities. Virtualization takes a lot of code. With all this extra code, it is possible that you are actually expanding the attack surface instead.
It is likely inconsequential for most people just running a couple personal services at home, but organizations are pretty frequently targeted by sophisticated attacks, where the consequences of a breach can be severe.
Yes, many of these vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit, either requiring local access or the existence of another vulnerability to achieve local access.
However, there also exists a massive market segment whose entire business model relies on selling local access to VM compute resources, cloud server providers. An attacker could simply rent a VM on a vulnerable platform to gain the needed local access, launch an attack on the host and thereby compromise the other guests on the same machine.
There have been an incredible number of flaws found and fixed (for now) in the isolation provided by virtual machines. VMware had a spat of critical vulnerabilities in 2024.
Thanks for the in depth clarification. I had in mind how quick re-installing a system was after a failure but indeed security itself is fundamental.
So to try to better gauge the risk here when you say
what level of efforts are you talking about here? State level 0-day required with team of actual humans trying to hack? Script kiddy downloading Kali and playing for 1h? Something totally automated perpetually scanning the Internet in minutes and owning you without even caring for who you are?
I did read about blue pilling years ago (damn just checked, nearly 20 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software) ) but it seems that since it’s the 1 thing solutions like Docker, Podman, etc and VM propers (and then the underlying hardware) have to worry about, it feels like it would be like trying to break-in by focus on a lock rather than breaking a window, namely the “hard” part of the setup.
Yeah, containerization does make it much easier to just throw away the base system and start fresh. This way, you don’t have to worry about possibly straying the recommended upgrade path and accidentally breaking something.
More code adds complexity, complexity leads to more bugs, more bugs means more vulnerabilities. Virtualization takes a lot of code. With all this extra code, it is possible that you are actually expanding the attack surface instead.
It is likely inconsequential for most people just running a couple personal services at home, but organizations are pretty frequently targeted by sophisticated attacks, where the consequences of a breach can be severe.
Yes, many of these vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit, either requiring local access or the existence of another vulnerability to achieve local access.
However, there also exists a massive market segment whose entire business model relies on selling local access to VM compute resources, cloud server providers. An attacker could simply rent a VM on a vulnerable platform to gain the needed local access, launch an attack on the host and thereby compromise the other guests on the same machine.
There have been an incredible number of flaws found and fixed (for now) in the isolation provided by virtual machines. VMware had a spat of critical vulnerabilities in 2024.