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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by robber@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

In a comment over at !selfhosted@lemmy.world someone wrote:

Containers are not a security barrier. They cannot be, they never will be.

I'm no expert but my mental model of containers was different in that I thought containerized processes live in somehow separate environments, at least filesystem- and network-wise.

I run self-hosted services in containers on my server to isolate them from each other, and now and then binaries I don't fully trust (things like suspected slop code or not well known python libraries) in containers on my laptop.

Does someone with more technical knowledge about how containers work feel like explaining whether that is a bad idea and if so why? That would be highly appreciated.

Edit: missing words and punctuation.

Edit 2: I would like to thank everyone who took the time to reply. My key take aways are that I will move my self-hosted services into VMs for proper isolation, but that it's probably fine to use a container when I want to make sure an LLM doesn't accidentally rm -rf my laptop system when it gets stuck.

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[-] jld@lemmy.zip 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It's true that containers were built for reproducibility rather than security, but it's also true that they can be a helpful tool in securing an environment. Not the ONLY tool, but a helpful one, as they implement kernel namespaces, and, also, tools like podman give you easy access to seccomp-bpf as well. I've personally used containers as part of a sandbox for an AI agent, but I integrated quite a lot of security components apart from the container itself, including proper firewall rules on the host level, a landlock ruleset inside the container, a custom seccomp-bpf profile, DNS allowlisting to avoid DNS data exfiltration, and, of course, basic container hardening stuff, like setting the filesystem to read-only, or setting proper uid/gid mapping. There's a lot you can do with it, but simply containerizing an application won't secure it by default.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

containers were built for reproducibility

containers were built for a lot more things than reproducibility

[-] jld@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago

I should have just said that containers are, at the very least, a component in security. There’s this running argument that containers are not meant for security, but if we actually go back to jails in FreeBSD that’s not really the case, so we are in agreement. Isolation is their original goal. And I would argue that isolation is definitely a tool for security.

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
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