Well Begun is Half Done: An Empirical Study of Exploitability & Impact of Base-Image Vulnerabilities

Container technology, (e.g., Docker) is being widely adopted for deploying software infrastructures or applications in the form of container images. Security vulnerabilities in the container images are a primary concern for developing containerized software. Exploitation of the vulnerabilities could result in disastrous impact, such as loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of containerized software. Understanding the exploitability and impact characteristics of vulnerabilities can help in securing the configuration of containerized software. However, there is a lack of research aimed at empirically identifying and understanding the exploitability and impact of vulnerabilities in container images. We carried out an empirical study to investigate the exploitability and impact of security vulnerabilities in base-images and their prevalence in open-source containerized software. We considered base-images since container images are built from base-images that provide all the core functionalities to build and operate containerized software. Besides, security vulnerabilities in a base-image can propagate to derived container images, which can host different applications. That means a single exploitable vulnerability in base-images can result in security attacks in several containerized software. Our analysis of a set of 1, 983 unique base-image security vulnerabilities revealed 13 novel findings. These findings are expected to help developers to understand the potential security problems related to base-images and encourage them to investigate base-images from security perspective before developing their applications. For researchers, this study highlights the need of developing tools for mitigating the exploitability of vulnerable base-images.