Hardening Containers with Seccomp: Hands-On Profiles, Pitfalls, and Real Exploits
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BSides Las Vegas 2025 · Day 1
This session frames **seccomp** as an underused Linux kernel capability that can materially constrain attackers inside **containerized** environments—even when initial compromise succeeds. The speaker, introducing himself as Ben and as co-founder and CTO at a cloud security company called **Armo**, positions the talk around adoption friction: seccomp is known in parts of the security community but rarely operationalized at scale in cloud-native fleets. He connects historical motivations (browser sandboxes, limiting dangerous syscalls) to modern **Kubernetes** and **Docker** defaults, then argues that the real gap is usability and observability, not raw kernel power. The presentation includes two live demonstrations: a comparison of **unconfined** versus default-profile containers attempting namespace and **keyring**-style operations, and a second demo that walks from successful exploitation of a vulnerable application to blocking repeat exploitation using a syscall profile derived from observed behavior (via tooling associated with the **Kubescape** open source project and **eBPF**-based observation).
AI review
A practitioner-grounded tour of seccomp in containers with credible threat framing, honest limits on argument filtering, and a risky live demo that actually shows syscall policy blocking a real exploit chain.