International Business Machines Corporation

Ricardo Andrei Koller Jemio

Malgorzata Steinder

Hai Huang

Daniel J Williams

Jia Jun Brandon Lum

Sahil Suneja

Techniques facilitating security hardening systems that host containers are provided. In one example, a system comprises: a memory that stores computer executable components; and a processor that executes computer executable components stored in the memory. The computer executable components comprise: a boot component performs a portion of a trusted boot sequence to securely boot the system to a defined secure state wherein one or more types of administrative access to a container memory are deactivated. The computer executable components also comprise: a core service component started as a part of the trusted boot sequence and that securely obtains one or more decryption keys for use with the container memory; and a runtime decryption component that uses the one or more decryption keys to perform runtime decryption of one or more files accessed by a container associated with the container memory.

Blackbox security for containers

Application code is obtained at a compiler toolchain, which accesses a package manager that tracks dependencies for a set of software components including application-level components represented as application-level packages, hypervisor interface-level components represented as hypervisor interface-level packages, and hypervisor-level components represented as hypervisor-level packages. A dependency solver is employed to select a sub-set of the set of packages that satisfy the dependencies. The sub-set of packages is assembled into an executable bundle, including a statically-linked binary built entirely from the sub-set of the selected packages that contains no external dependencies except calls to an interface defined entirely by the hypervisor interface-level packages, and a specialized monitor built entirely from the sub-set of the selected packages that runs on a standard operating system, loads and executes the statically-linked binary, and interacts with the statically-linked binary only through the interface defined by the hypervisor interface-level packages.

Growing community of inventors

White Plains, NY, United States of America

Ricardo Andrei Koller Jemio