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Comment by Lutger

4 days ago

Everything runs in the container and cannot escape it. Its like a sandbox.

You have to make sure you're not putting any secrets in the container environment.

10 comments

Lutger

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roozbeh18  4 days ago

You are just reducing the blast radius with use of podman; you will likely need secrets for your app to work, which will be exposed regardless of the podman approach.

  • Aeolun  4 days ago

    Most people don’t have NPM keys in their application containers.

    • XorNot  4 days ago

      If you're developing in a container then you would have to be doing it without doing something like say, mounting your home directory into it.

      The reality here is this is the sort of attack SELinux should be good at stopping (it's not because no one uses SELinux, the policies most commonly used don't confine the user profile in a useful way, and a whole bunch of tools love ambient credentials in environment variables).

mlnj  4 days ago

>You have to make sure you're not putting any secrets in the container environment.

How does this work exactly? containers still need env vars and access to databases and cloud environments. Without these the container is just useless isolated pod.

  • lbhdc  4 days ago

    Not who you asked, but I have a similar setup. I can run everything I need for local development in that image (db, message queue emulator, cache, other services). So, setting things like environment variables or running postgres work the same as they do outside the container.

    The image itself isn't the same image that the app gets deployed in, but is a portable dev environment with everything needed to build and run my apps baked in.

    This comes with some nice side effects like being able to instantly spin up clean work environments on my laptop, someone elses, or a remote vm.

  • Lutger  4 days ago

    This really depends on your setup. If possible, I have local development containers as much as possible. nginx, postgres, redis, etc. I have several containers, each only has access to what it needs. We have an isolated cloud environment for development, in its own aws account.

    Its not going to stop attacks, but it will limit blast radius a lot.