Cloud Container Security Solutions

Container Visibility and Visualization of Deployed Containers


Lacework delivers native container support, reduces the attack surfaces and effectively detects threats in a containerized environment. It automatically discovers every container across a user’s environment and clusters them based on different behaviors. Lacework visualizes your containerized applications in real-time, providing a clear understanding of communications, launches and other cloud runtime behaviors. 

Host Security
Containers can be thought of as lightweight virtual machines with much leaner system requirements. Virtualization emulates the guest system, translating every instruction between the guest and host. Containers, on the other hand, share the kernel and execute instructions on the host directly. This implies that the main attack surface is still the host as it is shared across containers and any compromise at the host level can compromise all containers. The other challenge is that not all services are run in the container as there is a long list of OS level and management services which run outside containers and are part of the attack surface.

Cloud Container Security Using Behavioral Patterns
Lacework discovers every container and uses machine learning to establish each container’s normal behavioral patterns. We then place containers with similar behaviors into a single, logical cluster – called a “Polygraph” – each with a baseline of expected characteristics and behaviors.

Clustering containers based on behavior dramatically simplifies the visualization of a containerized cloud in a Lacework Polygraph® by representing dozens or even hundreds of similar containers as a single item. This means new containers or configuration changes do not generate alerts as long as behaviors stay within the expected baseline.

This also reduces notification clutter by delivering high-precision alerts only once per container cluster. Lacework creates multiple types of polygraphs based on different behavioral categories:

  • The communication polygraph baselines the communication pattern between different container clusters;
  • The launch polygraph baselines the launch behavior of the container clusters;
  • The privilege change polygraph baselines the user privilege changes within the containers;
  • The user activity polygraph baselines user behavior.