Hertz: Abusing privileged and unprivileged Linux containers

This white paper by Jesse Hertz [PDF] examines various ways to compromise and escape from containers on Linux systems. "A common configuration for companies offering PaaS solutions built on containers is to have multiple customers’ containers running on the same physical host. By default, both LXC and Docker setup container networking so that all containers share the same Linux virtual bridge. These containers will be able to communicate with each other. Even if this direct network access is disabled (using the –icc=false flag for Docker, or using iptables rules for LXC), containers aren’t restricted for link-layer traffic. In particular, it is possible (and in fact quite easy) to conduct an ARP spoofing attack on another container within the same host system, allowing full middle-person attacks of the targeted container’s traffic."

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