Linux Security Summit North America 2017

The host operating system and kernel are natural targets on machines which host containers, hostile or otherwise. In this talk we’ll discuss a new open source project called LinuxKit — which is part of the open source Moby Project, and led by Docker. LinuxKit is a tool for building Linux subsystems specifically designed to securely host containers. We’re making design decisions specific to our use case: read only host rootfs, small non-modularized config with most things disabled, etc.

We are actively working on upstreaming kernel features (e.g. teaching IMA about namespaces, so it can be sensibly used by containers), and incubating other projects such as WireGuard, Landlock, and HPE’s okernel separation project. Additionally, we are interested collaborating on kernel hardening patches, and are interested in finding other collaboration opportunities at LSS.