Leadership Hijacking in Docker Swarm and Its Consequences

Area of Science:

• Cloud Computing Security
• Cybersecurity
• Software Engineering

Background:

• Modern cloud environments increasingly utilize container infrastructures like Docker Swarm for microservice architectures.
• Docker Swarm offers high availability and fault tolerance but faces security challenges from container escape vulnerabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate security vulnerabilities in Docker Swarm, specifically focusing on misbehaving manager nodes.
• To demonstrate a high-impact privilege escalation attack known as leadership hijacking.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of Docker Swarm's security against compromised manager nodes.
• Demonstration of an end-to-end attack scenario leveraging container escape and lateral movement.
• Evaluation of cloud lateral movement and defense evasion techniques within Docker Swarm.

Main Results:

• Docker Swarm is susceptible to leadership hijacking, enabling adversaries to gain full control of the cluster.
• A successful attack allows an adversary with application access to control all hosts in the Docker Swarm cluster.
• Existing cloud security literature often neglects the possibility of such privilege escalation attacks.

Conclusions:

• Container orchestration infrastructures need enhanced security measures against misbehaving nodes.
• Reducing the trust level of participating nodes is crucial.
• Implementing adversary-immune leader election algorithms can mitigate high-impact privilege escalation attacks.