Nathan McCauley

Author Archives: Nathan McCauley

Security through Community: Introducing the Vendor Security Alliance

Today Docker is proud to announce that we are founding member of the Vendor Security Alliance (VSA), a coalition formed to help organizations streamline their vendor evaluation processes by establishing a standardized questionnaire for appraising a vendor’s security and compliance practices.The VSA was established to solve a fundamental problem: how can IT teams conform to its existing security practices when procuring and deploying third-party components and platforms?

The VSA solves this problem by developing a required set of security questions that will allow vendors to demonstrate to their prospective customers that they are doing a good job with security and data handling. Good security is built on great technology paired with processes and policies. Until today, there was no consistent way to discern if all these things were in place. Doing a proper security evaluation today tends to be a hard, manual process. A large number of key questions come to mind when gauging how well a third-party company manages security.

As an example, these are the types of things that IT teams must be aware of when assessing a vendor’s security posture:

  • Do they securely handle sensitive customer data?
  • Do they have the ability to detect when attacks occur on their Continue reading

Your Software is Safer in Docker Containers

The Docker security philosophy is Secure by Default. Meaning security should be inherent in the platform for all applications and not a separate solution that needs to be deployed, configured and integrated.

Today, Docker Engine supports all of the isolation features available in the Linux kernel. Not only that, but we’ve supported a simple user experience by implementing default configurations that provide greater protection for applications running within the Docker Engine, making strong security default for all containerized applications while still leaving the controls with the admin to change configurations and policies as needed.

But don’t take our word for it.  Two independent groups have evaluated Docker Engine for you and recently released statements about the inherent security value of Docker.

Gartner analyst Joerg Fritsch recently published a new paper titled How to Secure Docker Containers in Operation on this blog post.  In it Fritsch states the following:

“Gartner asserts that applications deployed in containers are more secure than applications deployed on the bare OS” because even if a container is cracked “they greatly limit the damage of a successful compromise because applications and users are isolated on a per-container basis so that they cannot compromise other containers or the host OS”.

Additionally, NCC Group contrasted the security Continue reading