Researchers at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany published a study revealing that tens of thousands of container images hosted on Docker Hub contain confidential secrets, exposing software, online platforms, and users to a massive attack surface.
This isn't really surprising and isn't actually a real security issue with Docker itself or any of the popular public images. Docker Hub is a public registry so people inexperienced with Docker accidentally include secrets in their images and upload it to Docker Hub, this is actually pretty well known and the Docker docs specifically warn people about this.
It’s actually how people build their images, in which some include sensitive data (when they should definitely not).
It’s the same problem as exposed S3 buckets actually, nothing wrong with docker in itself.
I guess it depends, if it's a secret in use for the image, an attacker might use it to attack a pulled instance if the user deploying it didn't change the secret. Kind of like an unchanged initial password.
Is this even a legitimate problem? Lots of people, myself included, have a "local" configuration. All of the services and credentials mentioned in the config are running on my personal machine for testing only during active development. None of those credentials refer to any sort of "real" service that's on 24/7 and accessible via the internet. It's effectively dummy data to the rest of the world and I imagine there are a ton of false positives like what I just described.
Of course. In my opinion, what Docker is used for on Hub is a different model than it was originally supposed to solve. It was designed as a solution for enterprise where the development team had no easy control over the production environment, so the solution was to bundle the platform with the software. However, your production team is usually trustworthy, so leaking secrets via the container isn't an issue (or actually sometimes you wanted the image to include secrets).
The fact that Hub exists is a problem in itself in my opinion. Even things like the AUR - which comes with its own set of problems - is a better solution.
nix provides a solution to build clean Docker images. But then again it only works for packages that are either in nixpkgs already or you have written a derivation for, the latter being probably more effort than a quick and dirty dockerfile.
Well not the Hub itself is the problem, rather the fact it's being used wrong. You're not supposed to publish your private images publicly, if you do that's your problem. The Hub (or Docker) are pretty much completely unrelated to this issue. People who do this are probably also going to leave S3 buckets unsecured, commit passwords to Git and so on and so forth.
I’m sure plenty of the offenders are legitimate, but it’s completely safe to check private key pairs into code, or to bake them in to images. It entirely depends on what the key pairs are used for. Very common to include key pairs for development/test environments, for example. If it’s a production secret, of course you don’t do this.
You're right in one sense but when you get to the last sentence your argument breaks down.
The same type of secret should be treated the same way. The problem with treating environments different is that it builds bad habits especially for new devs who come in and see it being done in a certain way. But also, humans screw up and it's better to just build the habit of not committing anything private outside of prod-like credential stores even if it's not the prod instance.
We build all our image layers in house from a base nginx or node image. We're moving to [scratch[(https://hub.docker.com/_/scratch/) soon to even eliminate going to Docker hub at all.
For home stuff, I don't super care. I'll just update as necessary and if something happens and someone gets in, it's just my stuff.