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312-50V11 · Question #769

Why containers are less secure that virtual machine?

The correct answer is D. A compromise container may cause a CPU starvation of the host.. Containers share the host OS kernel rather than running isolated OS instances, so a compromised container can affect host-level resources such as CPU in ways a VM cannot.

Cloud Computing

Question

Why containers are less secure that virtual machine?

Options

  • AHost OS on containers has a larger surface attack.
  • BContainers are attached to the same virtual network.
  • CContainers may fulfill disk space of the host.
  • DA compromise container may cause a CPU starvation of the host.

How the community answered

(25 responses)
  • A
    8% (2)
  • B
    16% (4)
  • C
    4% (1)
  • D
    72% (18)

Why each option

Containers share the host OS kernel rather than running isolated OS instances, so a compromised container can affect host-level resources such as CPU in ways a VM cannot.

AHost OS on containers has a larger surface attack.

Containers do not expose a larger host OS attack surface than VMs - they actually reduce OS-layer exposure by eliminating guest OS stacks, though they do share the host kernel.

BContainers are attached to the same virtual network.

Attachment to a shared virtual network is a configurable property common to both containers and VMs and is not an inherent security disadvantage unique to containers.

CContainers may fulfill disk space of the host.

Disk space exhaustion is a resource management concern that can be mitigated with storage quotas on both containers and VMs and does not represent a security weakness specific to containers.

DA compromise container may cause a CPU starvation of the host.Correct

Because containers share the host OS kernel and lack the strict resource isolation enforced by a hypervisor, a compromised or malicious container can consume excessive CPU cycles and starve the host and co-located containers of processing resources. This type of denial-of-service impact on the host is not possible with fully isolated VMs because the hypervisor enforces hard resource boundaries between guest and host.

Concept tested: Container vs VM isolation and host resource security

Source: https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-190/final

Topics

#container security#virtual machines#container isolation#cloud security

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