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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've seen this repeated a lot, but I'm not really convinced running as root inside containers is a good/safe thing to do. User namespaces can provide some protection for the host, but that does nothing for the rest of the files inside the guest. For example, consider a server software with an arbitrary file write vulnerability. If the process is running as a low privilege user, exploiting the vulnerability might not really get you anywhere. If it's running as root, it's basically a free pass to root privilege and arbitrary code execution within the container.
That's why I mentioned rootless containers specifically. In those, root is at most the user running the container. It can't do a whole lot, because it's not really root. Each user in
/etc/subuidgets a range of dummy IDs >65535 specifically for containers for that user. When outside the container, everything shows as owned by the user, so root in the container can't even result in root owned files on the host, so no suid trickery or anything.Of course you should still run as a user in the container too, I was just pointing out in rootless containers the blast radius is much reduced because of that feature. Definitely still don't want root for many other reasons.