Design of a Hardening Module for Automatically Securing Containers

Modern microservices need to quickly face changes both in terms of technology and requirements of users. To address such a challenging scenario, developers and IT operators should be able to concentrate on integration and delivery tasks, possibly without having to deal with security aspects. In this vein, the creation of architectures for supporting the DevOps pipeline is an important goal. Yet, assessing the security of containers is a difficult task, especially when considering distributed or large-scale deployments. To cope with such complexity, this paper presents the design of a hardening module for automatically securing containers. Such a mechanism is part of the framework envisioned in Project Securing Containers - SecCo, which aims at offloading the DevOps software development paradigm from security-related tasks.