OWASP Docker Top 10

About Docker Top 10

The OWASP Docker Top 10 project is giving you ten bullet points to plan and implement a secure docker-based container environment. Those 10 points are ordered by relevance. Rather than representing risks as each single point in the OWASP Top 10, they represent security controls. The controls range from baseline security to more advanced controls, depending on your security requirements.

You could/should use it as a

Guidance in the design phase as a system specification for your containerized environment.
For auditing a such an environment.
Also for procurement it could provide a basis for specifying requirements in contracts.

Where is it? / Getting Involved

Development and discussions take place @ Github. After release you will find the released version also here.

Description

This guide is for developers, auditors, architects, system and networking engineers. As indicated above you can also use this guide for externals to add formal technical requirements in your contract. The information security officer will have an interest too that all your new security requirements are met.

The 10 bullet points here are about system and network security and also architecture. As a developer you don’t have to be an expert in those – that’s what this guide is for. But as indicated above best is to start thinking about those points early. Please do not just start building it. Also please keep in mind that once you build your container enviroment in a secure fashion, you need resources for operation and maintenance.

Security in Docker environments seemed often to be misunderstood. It was/is a highly disputed matter what the threats are supposed to be. So before diving into the Docker Top 10 bullet points, the threads are modeled. It not only helps understanding the security impacts but also gives you the ability to prioritize your task.

Why not “Container Security”

Albeit the name of this project carries the word “Docker”, it also can be used with little abstraction for containment solutions not using Docker. Docker is as of now the most popular one, so the in-depth details are focusing for now on Docker. This could change later.

A single container?

If you run more than 3 containers you probably have an orchestration solution to manage them. Specific security pitfalls of those are currently beyond the scope of this document. That doesn’t mean that this guide just looking at one or a few containers managed manually – on the contrary. It means only that we’re looking at the containers including their networking and their host systems in such an orchestrated environment and not on special pitfalls of e.g. Kubernetes, Swarm, Mesos or OpenShift.

Licensing

The Docker OWASP Top 10 document is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Some rights reserved.

Roadmap

The highest priorities for the next months are:

Publish and work on a first draft of the documentation
Complete this first draft
Better Gitbook integration (help welcome!)
Get other people involved to review the documentation and provide feedback
Incorporate feedback into the documentation
First Release

Subsequent Releases will add

Go from Draft to Release
Being promoted from an Incubator Project to a Lab Project

Note that there’s a PDF @ Github which may or may not (github is not good as a repo for binaries) reflect the current draft status. Build instructions are @ https://github.com/OWASP/Docker-Security#how-to-build-pdf-version.