Container Runtime Security with Falco

Effective security requires a layered approach. If one layer is comprised, the additional layers will (hopefully) stop an attacker from going further. Much of container security has focused on the image build process and providing providence for the artifacts in a container image, and restricting kernel level tunables in the container runtime (seccomp, SELinux, capabilities, etc). What if we can detect abnormal behavior in the application and the container runtime environment as well? In this talk, we’ll present Falco - an open source project for runtime security - and discuss how it provides application and container runtime security. We will show how Falco taps Linux system calls to provide low level insight into application behavior, and how to write Falco rules to detect abnormal behavior. Finally we will show how Falco can trigger notifications to stop abnormal behavior, notify humans, and isolate the compromised application for forensics. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the container security landscape, what problems runtime security solves, & how Falco can provide runtime security and incident response.