Container escape is a security risk in which malicious players can leverage a containerized application’s vulnerabilities to breach its isolation boundary, gaining access to the host system’s resources. Once an attacker accesses the host system, they can escalate their privilege to access other containers running in the machine or run harmful code on the host. Depending on how vulnerable the host is, the actor could also access other hosts in the network.
Recently, researchers from Positive Security published findings identifying a major remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in dompdf, a popular PDF generation library. In their reporting, they outlined a way that code could be loaded into an application and then remotely executed during a PDF being generated. Dompdf is used quite extensively within the PHP ecosystem, and is used within over 59,000 open sourced platforms and projects.
Static application security testing (SAST) tools automatically scan the source code of an application. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities before deployment. SAST tools perform white-box testing, which involves analyzing the code based on inside knowledge of the application. SAST offers granularity in detecting vulnerabilities, providing an assessment down to the line of code.
Today we’re pleased to announce an update to our popular Docker and Snyk vulnerability cheat sheet. Since 2020, millions of MacOS and Windows developers have been able to use docker scan to analyze their containers in their local environments as part of their day-to-day development. This capability gives teams feedback at the time of active development for faster cycles.