A new study looks at how current security practices around container use are falling short of helping developers achieve their stated goals.
The report from BellSoft surveyed over 400 developers and finds 23 percent report having experienced a security incident. The problem here isn’t detection, it’s the gap between disclosure and remediation. In this window, which can often be weeks or months, organizations operate with known exposures.
When it comes to the cause of problems 62 percent of respondents say human errors are the biggest contributor to container security mistakes. Package managers present a particularly critical security concern, as they expand the attack surface both directly and by enabling runtime installation of additional unnecessary components
Developers rank shells (54 percent) and package managers (39 percent) as the most essential tools inside the base container. But package managers along with other non-essential tools, create substantial vulnerability exposure in production environments. A more practical approach is using hardened minimal runtime images, paired with fuller ‘debug builds’ during development, allowing both security and diagnostics without compromise.
A majority (55 percent) report using general-purpose Linux distributions (Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat-based systems) with hundreds of packages their applications never use. Each represents potential vulnerabilities requiring security patches. When a vulnerability emerges, security teams must evaluate impact and coordinate across thousands of instances, regardless of whether the application uses the affected package.
Trusted registries (45 percent) and vulnerability scanning (43 percent) are the most commonly employed security mechanisms. These represent basic approaches to container security, whereby organizations are constantly responding to newly discovered vulnerabilities rather than building foundations to minimize exposure.
While 31 percent say they update container images with every release and 26 percent do so when critical vulnerabilities emerge, 33 percent update monthly, rarely or only a few times yearly, creating a substantial risk to applications and organizations. 48 percent say pre-hardened, security-focused base images would be most helpful in ensuring container security.
“Across every section of the survey, one message repeats consistently: Teams want security, efficiency and simplicity but their current strategies and tooling makes this difficult to achieve,” says Alex Belokrylov, CEO at BellSoft. “By adopting hardened images, much of the ongoing security and maintenance responsibility shifts to the image vendor, reducing operational burden and total cost of ownership, while enabling more stable, low-maintenance, and highly secure container environments”
The full report is available from the BellSoft site.
Image credit: Sergey Novikov/Dreamstime.com
