AppArmor Profile Generator as a Cloud Service

Along with the rapid development of containerization technology, remarkable benefits have been created for developers and operation teams, and overall software infrastructure. Although lots of effort has been devoted to enhancing containerization security, containerized environments still have a huge attack surface. This paper proposes a secure cloud service for generating a Linux security module, AppArmor profiles for containerized services. The profile generator service implements container runtime profiling to apply customized AppArmor policies to protect containerized services without the need to make hard and potentially error-prone manual policy configurations. To evaluate the effectiveness of the profile generator service, we enable it on a widely used containerized web service to generate profiles and test them with real-world attacks. We generate an exploit database with 11 exploits harmful to the tested web service. These exploits are sifted from the 56 exploits of Exploit- db targeting the tested web service’s software. We launch these exploits on the web service protected by the profile. The results show that the proposed profile generator service improves the test web service’s overall security a lot compared to using the default Docker security profile.