From what I have seen, rootless podman seems to take more effort than rootful one. I want to make a more informed decision for the containers, so I would like to ask.
- What is a rootless podman good for? How much does it help in terms of security, and does it have other benefits?
- One of the benefits commonly mentioned is for when container is breached. Then, running container on sudo-capable user would give no security benefits. Does it mean I should I run podman services on a non-privileged user?
Thank you!
You must log in or register to comment.
This answers all of your questions: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/13728 (link was edited, accidentally linked a redhat blog post that didn’t answer your Q directly but does make clear that specifying a user in rootless podman is important for security for the user running the rootless podman container if that user does more than just run the rootless podman container).
So the best defense plus ease of use is podman root assigning non-root UIDs to the containers. You can do the same with Docker, but Docker with non-root UIDs assigned still caries the risk of the root-level Docker daemon being hacked and exploited. Podman does not have a daemon to be hacked and exploited, meaning root Podman with non-root UIDs assigned has no downsides!
Thanks a lot for on-point answer! I wish the answered in the issue wrote a blog post, it would have been of great help.
One of the main advantage of podman is that, it respects the firewall rules. Docker don’t do that. Also having rootless podman means if somehow the container went rogue, it cannot have access to your root directory and perform malicious actions.
Also podman is a drop in replacement for docker. It does not need much configurations to setup. If you need compose, you might need to install podman-compose as well.
Rootless podman means that it is less likely to bork the system. It is also nice to have per user containers.
Another benefit is that you can run podman in a service user. This makes sandboxing much easier.
