Container environments provide cloud native applications with scalability, flexibility, and portable support. As a popular container orchestrator, Kubernetes facilitates automatic deployment and maintenance of a large number of containerized applications. However, potential misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, or implementation flaws may empower attackers to exploit the Kubernetes cluster. Although existing solutions such as runtime security policy enforcement may prevent an attack, they can be inefficient in large scale container environments. In this paper, we propose a performance profiling-based proactive security policy enforcement solution, namely, PerfSPEC. First, we accelerate the proactivization of policies (which typically requires significant manual effort) by proposing to profile and rank existing policies according to their induced overhead. This allows us to better focus our efforts and greatly improve the overall response time (e.g., by 98% in contrast to less than 49%). Then, we address the performance limitations of existing solutions by leveraging learning-based approaches to predict future events and compute their verification results in advance. As a result, PerfSPEC achieves a viable response time (e.g., less than 10 ms in contrast to 600 ms with one of the most popular existing approaches) even for large container environments (up to 800 Pods).

With the emergence of 5G networks and their large scale applications such as IoT and autonomous vehicles, telecom operators are increasingly offloading the computation closer to customers (i.e., on the edge). Such edge-core environments usually involve multiple Kubernetes clusters potentially owned by different providers. Confidentiality concerns could prevent those providers from sharing data freely with each other, which makes it challenging to perform common security tasks such as security verification across different clusters. In this work, we propose a solution for building cross-cluster security models to enable various security analyses, while preserving confidentiality for each cluster. We design a six-step methodology to model both the cross-cluster communication and cross-cluster event dependency, and we apply those models to different security use cases. We implement our solution based on a 5G edge-core environment that involves multiple Kubernetes clusters, and our experimental results demonstrate its efficiency (e.g., less than 8 seconds of processing time for a model with 3,600 edges and nodes) and accuracy (e.g., more than 96% for cross-cluster event prediction).

By providing lightweight and portable support for cloud native applications, container environments have gained significant momentum lately. A container orchestrator such as Kubernetes can enable the automatic deployment and maintenance of a large number of containerized applications. However, due to its critical role, a container orchestrator also attracts a wide range of security threats exploiting misconfigurations or implementation flaws. Moreover, enforcing security policies at runtime against such security threats becomes far more challenging, as the large scale of container environments implies high complexity, while the high dynamicity demands a short response time. In this paper, we tackle this key security challenge to container environments through a proactive approach, namely, ProSPEC. Our approach leverages learning-based prediction to conduct the computationally intensive steps (e.g., security verification) in advance, while keeping the runtime steps (e.g., policy enforcement) lightweight. Consequently, ProSPEC can ensure a practical response time (e.g., less than 10 ms in contrast to 600 ms with one of the most popular existing approaches) for large container environments (up to 800 Pods).