A Hybrid System Call Profiling Approach for Container Protection

Over-privileged Linux containers might put the underlying OS at risk by permitting pointless system calls that could be exploited as entry points to the kernel. However, finding such security profiles is a difficult task as it demands examining the implementation/operation of containers in the absence of knowledge regarding its required system calls. In this article, we propose a hybrid approach to limit the system call usage during the execution of containers. Specifically, given an application container, we maintain an initial fine-grained whitelist by dynamic tracking to control the run-time security along with a complementary whitelist extracted via static analysis to maintain container's functionality while addressing the coverage limitation of dynamic analysis. Our method automatically analyzes the container behavior to identify three execution phases and dynamically enforce the corresponding fine-grained system call whitelists. The invoked system call will be compared with both whitelists to decide if it should be killed to guarantee the container security or logged for further analysis. Our evaluation results with 193 Docker images demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in significantly reducing the required system calls during the applications’ life-cycle. Furthermore, we discuss the reduced attack surface and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach through empirical analysis results.