Secure Substrate: Building the Moby Whale

GOTO Copenhagen 2017

The popularity of containers has driven the need for distributed systems that can provide a substrate for container deployments. These systems need the ability to provision and manage resources, place workloads, and adapt in the presence of failures. In particular, container orchestrators make it easy for anyone to manage their container workloads using their cloud-based or on-premise infrastructure. Unfortunately, most of these systems have not been architected with security in mind. Compromise of a less-privileged node can allow an attacker to escalate privileges to either gain control of the whole system, or to access resources it shouldn't have access to. In this talk, we will go over how Docker has been working to build secure blocks that allow you to run a least privilege infrastructure - where any participant of the system only has access to the resources that are strictly necessary for its legitimate purpose. No more, no less.