Docker Bench Security

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Frequently, best practices help you to have a safe environment, docker-bench-security is an open source project that runs in a container and scans your environment to report a set of common mistakes like:

Your kernel is too old
Your docker is not up to date
Some Docker daemon configurations are not good enough to run a production environment
Your container runs 2 processes
and others

It’s a great idea to run it at some stage in each host to have an idea about the status of your environment. To do that you can just use this command when running a container

$ docker run -it --net host --pid host --cap-add audit_control \
    -v /var/lib:/var/lib \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v /usr/lib/systemd:/usr/lib/systemd \
    -v /etc:/etc --label docker_bench_security \
    docker/docker-bench-security

A good way to start is your run it in your local environment. Run the command and check what you can do to make your local environment safe. This tool is open source on GitHub and it’s also a great example of collaboration and how a community can share experiences to help other members to improve an environment. This is a partial output:

Initializing Thu Nov 24 21:35:24 GMT 2016

[INFO] 1 - Host Configuration
[WARN] 1.1  - Create a separate partition for containers
[PASS] 1.2  - Use an updated Linux Kernel
[PASS] 1.4  - Remove all non-essential services from the host - Network
[PASS] 1.5  - Keep Docker up to date
[INFO]       * Using 1.13.01 which is current as of 2016-10-26
[INFO]       * Check with your operating system vendor for support and security maintenance for docker
[INFO] 1.6  - Only allow trusted users to control Docker daemon
[INFO]      * docker:x:999:gianarb
[WARN] 1.7  - Failed to inspect: auditctl command not found.
[WARN] 1.8  - Failed to inspect: auditctl command not found.
[WARN] 1.9  - Failed to inspect: auditctl command not found.
[INFO] 1.10 - Audit Docker files and directories - docker.service
[INFO]      * File not found
[INFO] 1.11 - Audit Docker files and directories - docker.socket
[INFO]      * File not found

Sometime to have a good result you just need to run a single command.

This article is part of “Drive your boat like a Captain”. It’s a book about Docker in production, how manage a cluster of Docker Engine with Swarm and what it means to manage a production environment today.

Keep in touch to receive news about the book scaledocker.com. If you are looking for a Docker Getting Started you can also look on the first chapter that I released Docker The Fundamentals