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.
Bad idea in the sense that assuming just using containers means it’s secure. You can make it pretty secure though. There’s stuff like istio and cilium to lock things down. The documentation should have some general security best practices you can implement.