How do i you decide whats safe to run

I recently ran Gossa on my home server using Docker, mounting it to a folder. Since I used rootless Docker, I was curious - if Gossa were to be a virus, would I have been infected? Have any of you had experience with Gossa?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Containers are isolated from the host by default. If you give a container a mount, it can only interact with the mount, but not the running host. If you further isolated and protected that mount, you would have been fine. Since you ran it as your unprivileged user, it’s one step safer from being able to hijack other parts of the machine, and if it was a “virus”, all it could do is write files to the mount and fill up your disk I guess, or drop a binary and hope you execute it.

    • asap@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      Containers are isolated from the host by default.

      Are you certain about that? My understanding is that Docker containers are literally just processes running on the host (ideally rootless), but with no isolation in the way that VMs are isolated from the host.

      If you have some links for further reading it would be great, as I have been extremely cautious with my Docker usage so far.

      I haven’t found anything to refute this, but this post from 2017 states:

      In 2017 alone, 434 linux kernel exploits were found, and as you have seen in this post, kernel exploits can be devastating for containerized environments. This is because containers share the same kernel as the host, thus trusting the built-in protection mechanisms alone isn’t sufficient.

      If someone exploits a kernel bug inside a container, they exploited it on the host OS. If this exploit allows for code execution, it will be executed on the host OS, not inside the container.

      If this exploit allows for arbitrary memory access, the attacker can change or read any data for any other container.