Comment on Question on SSL traffic between podman containers and clients (should I run k3s?)

• Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nothing wrong with asking LLM’s about topics, I’d even say it’s a good idea instead of directly asking on a forum. Just like searching before asking, asking an LLM before asking humans is good.

  And mentioning where you got the recommendation for k8s is also helpful. I’m not knowledgeable about k8s, but I guess the “wtf” was about the overkill of recommending k8s when simpler solutions exist.

  Unix sockets have permissions like any file, so it’s simple to restrict access to a user/group and thus process running as the user. If it’s unencrypted http on a server other processes could listen on localhost, but I’m unsure about that part.

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  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sorry for replying this late; I wanted to read more about Unix sockets and podman before I got back. Thanks for your comment.

    I already responded to the other commenter with what I’ve understood and my plans, I’ll paste it here too:

    If I understand correctly, Unix sockets specifically allow two or more processes to communicate amongst each other, and are supporter on Podman (and Docker).

    Now, the question is: how do I programmatically programmatically utilise sockets for containers to communicate amongst each other?

    I was considering a reverse proxy per pod as someone else suggested, since every podman pod has its own network namespace. Connecting between pods should likely be through the reverse proxies then. I just need to figure out how I can automate the deployment of such proxies along with the pods.

    Thanks again for your comment, and please let me know if I’m missing anything.

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    • Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thanks for the long reply. Sadly I don’t know enough about unix sockets and docker/podman networking to help you.

      I’ve only used unix sockets with postgresql and signald. For both I had to mount the socket into the container and for the postgres I had to change the config to use unix sockets.

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      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I see. My use-case would probably be better served through a software bus implementation (how would I keep all of these containers attached to the bus? Isn’t that a security risk?), but perhaps handling everything through the network behind individual reverse-proxies might be the best idea in this case.

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• vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is the fact that I mentioned ChatGPT setting a wrong impression?

  Not at all, but the fact that it suggested jumping straight to k8s for such a trivial problem is… interesting.

  how using Unix sockets would improve my security posture here

  Unix sockets enforce another layer of protection by requiring the user/application writing/reading to/from them to have a valid UID or be part of the correct group (traditional Linux/Unix permission system). Whereas using plain localhost HTTP networking, a rogue application could somehow listen on the loopback interface and/or exploit a race condition to bind the port and prentend to be the “real” application. Network namespaces (which container management tools use to create isolated virtual networks) mostly solve this problem. Again, basic unencrypted localhost networking is fine for a vast majority of use cases/threat models.

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  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hey, thanks for your comment. My apologies in replying this late; I wanted to read more about Unix sockets and podman before I got back.

    If I understand correctly, Unix sockets specifically allow two or more processes to communicate amongst each other, and are supporter on Podman (and Docker).

    Now, the question is: how do I programmatically programmatically utilise sockets for containers to communicate amongst each other?

    I was considering a reverse proxy per pod as someone else suggested, since every podman pod has its own network namespace. Connecting between pods should likely be through the reverse proxies then. I just need to figure out how I can automate the deployment of such proxies along with the pods.

    Thanks again for your comment, and please let me know if I’m missing anything.

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    • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      how do I programmatically programmatically utilise sockets for containers to communicate amongst each other?

      Sockets are filesystem objects, similar to a file. So for 2 containers to access the same socket, the container exposing the socket must export it to the host filesystem via a bind mount/volume, and the container that needs read/write on this socket must be able to access it, also via a bind mount. The user ID or groups of the user accessing the socket must be allowed to access the socket via traditional unix permissions.

      Again, I personally do not bother with this, install the reverse proxy directly on the host, and configure it to forward traffic over HTTP on the loopback interface to your containers.

      how I can automate the deployment of such proxies along with the pods

      That’s a separate question. I use ansible for all deployment/automation needs - when it comes to podman I use the podman_container and podman_generate_systemd modules to automate deployment of containers as systemd services. The ansible also configures my reverse proxy to forward traffic to the container (simply copy files in /etc/apache2/sites-available/…; a2enconf; systemctl reload apache2). I have not used pods yet, but there is a podman_pod module. A simple bash script should also do the trick in a first time.

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      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I would probably look into plugging the RP into the appropriate podman network namespaces, or running it on a dedicated host (VM/physical - this time using SSL/TLS between RP and applications, since traffic leaves the host) and implementing port forwarding/firewalling with netfilter.

        Could you detail how you would do this? Especially since the containers in my case do not support HTTPS (they do not have the libraries compiler, if I’m not wrong).

        Thank you for the clarification. I do not think I’ll be running malicious containers inside my pods, but I would like to contain unencrypted traffic as much as possible. Running an RP for every pod seems doable and since I reach containers through their loopback address inside the pod, this is reasonably safe for my use-case too.

        Could you confirm if one can reach one’s containers on the loopback address in a separate network namespace on podman? I was wondering about the differences between a pod and a network namespace on podman, and so far the only mention of something like this is that containers in pods share a “security context”. I don’t know enough to understand what this is since I haven’t read about pods in Kubernetes.

        Thanks, I was planning to use Ansible too.

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