BPFGuard: Multi-Granularity Container Runtime Mandatory Access Control

Abstract

The adoption of container-based cloud computing services has been prevalent, especially with the introduction of Kubernetes, which enables the automated deployment, scaling, and administration of applications in containers, hence boosting the popularity of containers. As a result, researchers have placed greater emphasis on container runtime security, notably investigating the efficacy of traditional techniques such as Capabilities, Seccomp, and Linux security modules in guaranteeing container security. However, due to the limitations imposed by the container environment, the results have been unsatisfactory. In addition, eBPF-based solutions face the problem of being unable to quickly load policies and affect real-time operations when faced with newer kernel vulnerabilities. This paper investigates the limitations of existing container security mechanisms. Additionally, it examines the specific constraints of these mechanisms in Kubernetes environments. The paper classifies container monitoring and obligatory access control into three distinct categories: system call access control, LSM hook access control, and kernel function access control. Therefore, we propose a technique for regulating container access with a variety of granularity levels. This technique is executed using eBPF and is tightly integrated with Kubernetes to collect relevant meta-information. In addition, we suggest implementing a consolidated routing method and employing function tail call chaining to overcome the limitation of eBPF in enforcing mandatory access control for containers. Lastly, we conducted a series of experiment to verify the effectiveness of the system's security using CVE-2022-0492 and to benchmark the system that had BPFGuard enabled. The results indicate that the average performance loss increased merely by 2.16%, demonstrating that there are no adverse effects on the container services. This suggests that greater security can be achieved at a minimal cost.