And containers were initially and primarily about convenience not security. They were a way to quickly launch a preconfigured environment to respond to demand or to eliminate the need to manualy configure dev and test environments and avoid the "works on my machine" phenomenon.
People will more often than not, take the path of least resistance. Even if you tell them it's dangerous they will not care. People run this stuff on their primary workstation, unconfined, with permissions disabled because they don't want be bothered with accepting permission requests. This is all well and good until it decides to drop your production database or delete your home directory. Most of them don't even learn their lesson after that even.
Becuase a lot of devs don't know this stuff. There's a reason security engineers (as in SWEs who specialize in securing specific attack surfaces) remain in hot demand.
Security engineer here :) Just a little side note, docker is also very often useful for evading EDR/XDR/etc. Want to talk to a domain controller with something like impacket but your EDR kills it? Try a container.
Because it effectively makes no difference to my security posture. My user account also has sudo access (it requests TouchID but I also wouldn't die on the hill if someone said they have no password sudo access), and realistically everything of value on this machine exists in my home directory. Being able to escalate to root really doesn't give an attacker very much that they don't already have if they've got access to my user account.
Maybe you don’t do anything with your computer but for me the difference between my sudo+password/fingerprint and sudoless access to my linux user is huge.
For one thing, 1Password unlocks with system authentication unless it’s been inactive for a certain amount of time or if the system has been restarted.
Without sudo you can’t modify my firewall rules, can’t modify my kernel, boot partition, install/run privileged software, and the list goes on and on.
Sure, having my local account compromised would be really bad, but security is done in layers. I’m not going to give my local user permanent root access via docker just because I didn’t feel like typing “sudo.” That’s not enough of a benefit to leave that door wide open.
Think about it this way: there could be an exploit where you could run something as my user without knowing my password. Maybe some program my user is running has an exploit, let’s say yet another npm package gets compromised and I unwittingly run it. If you can now run anything in docker as root with that blast radius just got way worse.
Rather, why do people still run agents as their own user. IMO, agent sessions should at least be containerised with just necessary code mounted.
Safety and simplicity are concepts that often won't get along very well with eachother.
And containers were initially and primarily about convenience not security. They were a way to quickly launch a preconfigured environment to respond to demand or to eliminate the need to manualy configure dev and test environments and avoid the "works on my machine" phenomenon.
People will more often than not, take the path of least resistance. Even if you tell them it's dangerous they will not care. People run this stuff on their primary workstation, unconfined, with permissions disabled because they don't want be bothered with accepting permission requests. This is all well and good until it decides to drop your production database or delete your home directory. Most of them don't even learn their lesson after that even.
Convenience. Want to run `docker run ...` without password, want IDEs and agents to be able to run containers...
Use podman then, or rootless docker if you can make it work
For most CRUD apps running in docker its enough to just tell the "agent" to use podman.
Becuase a lot of devs don't know this stuff. There's a reason security engineers (as in SWEs who specialize in securing specific attack surfaces) remain in hot demand.
Security engineer here :) Just a little side note, docker is also very often useful for evading EDR/XDR/etc. Want to talk to a domain controller with something like impacket but your EDR kills it? Try a container.
Because it effectively makes no difference to my security posture. My user account also has sudo access (it requests TouchID but I also wouldn't die on the hill if someone said they have no password sudo access), and realistically everything of value on this machine exists in my home directory. Being able to escalate to root really doesn't give an attacker very much that they don't already have if they've got access to my user account.
Maybe you don’t do anything with your computer but for me the difference between my sudo+password/fingerprint and sudoless access to my linux user is huge.
For one thing, 1Password unlocks with system authentication unless it’s been inactive for a certain amount of time or if the system has been restarted.
Without sudo you can’t modify my firewall rules, can’t modify my kernel, boot partition, install/run privileged software, and the list goes on and on.
Sure, having my local account compromised would be really bad, but security is done in layers. I’m not going to give my local user permanent root access via docker just because I didn’t feel like typing “sudo.” That’s not enough of a benefit to leave that door wide open.
Think about it this way: there could be an exploit where you could run something as my user without knowing my password. Maybe some program my user is running has an exploit, let’s say yet another npm package gets compromised and I unwittingly run it. If you can now run anything in docker as root with that blast radius just got way worse.