Docker Container Security in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Docker is popular within the software development community due to the versatility, portability, and scalability of containers. However, concerns over vulnerabilities have grown as the security of applications become increasingly dependent on the security of the images that serve as the applications' building blocks. As more development processes migrate to the cloud, validating the security of images that are pulled from various repositories is paramount. In this paper, we describe a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) system that validates the security of Docker images throughout the software development life cycle. We introduce images with vulnerabilities and measure the effectiveness of our approach at identifying the vulnerabilities. In addition, we use dynamic analysis to assess the security of Docker containers based on their behavior and show that it complements the static analyses typically used for security assessments.