Comparison
Container escapevsPrivileged container
Container escape
the attacker got out of the container onto the node, and from the node to every other tenant's workload on it.
Getting from inside a container to the host, usually via a kernel vulnerability, an over-permissive capability, a mounted host path or a mounted container socket. It is the reason containers are called an isolation mechanism rather than a security boundary: everything shares one kernel. The practical defences are unglamorous — run as non-root, drop capabilities, never mount the runtime socket, and keep nodes patched.
Full entry →Privileged container
someone added one flag to make a mount work, and that container can now reconfigure the host.
A container run with most or all kernel capabilities and without the usual restrictions, effectively giving it host-level power. There are legitimate uses — some node agents genuinely need it — and there is a very long tail of workloads granted it once to unblock something and never revisited. It is the first thing an admission policy should be looking for, because it turns an application compromise into a node compromise.
Full entry →