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PSA: Docker nukes your firewall rules and replaces them with its own. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I use nftables to set my firewall rules. I typically manually configure the rules myself. Recently, I just happened to dump the ruleset, and, much to my surprise, my config was gone, and it was replaced with an enourmous amount of extremely cryptic firewall rules. After a quick examination of the rules, I found that it was Docker that had modified them. And after some brief research, I found a number of open issues, just like this one, of people complaining about this behaviour. I think it's an enourmous security risk to have Docker silently do this by default.

I have heard that Podman doesn't suffer from this issue, as it is daemonless. If that is true, I will certainly be switching from Docker to Podman.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (20 children)

This is standard, but often unwanted, behavior of docker.

Docker creates a bunch of chain rules, but IIRC, doesn't modify actual incoming rules (at least it doesn't for me) it just will make a chain rule for every internal docker network item to make sure all of the services can contact each other.

Yes it is a security risk, but if you don't have all ports forwarded, someone would still have to breach your internal network IIRC, so you would have many many more problems than docker.

I think from the dev's point of view (not that it is right or wrong), this is intended behavior simply because if docker didn't do this, they would get 1,000 issues opened per day of people saying containers don't work when they forgot to add a firewall rules for a new container.

Option to disable this behavior would be 100x better then current, but what do I know lol

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Yes it is a security risk, but if you don’t have all ports forwarded, someone would still have to breach your internal network IIRC, so you would have many many more problems than docker.

I think from the dev’s point of view (not that it is right or wrong), this is intended behavior simply because if docker didn’t do this, they would get 1,000 issues opened per day of people saying containers don’t work when they forgot to add a firewall rules for a new container.

My problem with this, is that when running a public facing server, this ends up with people exposing containers that really, really shouldn't be exposed.

Excerpt from another comment of mine:

It’s only docker where you have to deal with something like this:

***
services:
  webtop:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest
    container_name: webtop
    security_opt:
      - seccomp:unconfined #optional
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - SUBFOLDER=/ #optional
      - TITLE=Webtop #optional
    volumes:
      - /path/to/data:/config
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
      - 3001:3001
    restart: unless-stopped

Originally from here, edited for brevity.

Resulting in exposed services. Feel free to look at shodan or zoomeye, internet connected search engines, for exposed versions of this service. This service is highly dangerous to expose, as it gives people an in to your system via the docker socket.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

So uh, I just spun up a vps a couple days ago, few docker containers, usual security best practices... I used ufw to block all and open only ssh and a couple others, as that's what I've been told all I need to do. Should I be panicking about my containers fucking with the firewall?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Docker will have only exposed container ports if you told it to.

If you used -p 8080:80 (cli) or - 8080:80 (docker-compose) then docker will have dutifully NAT'd those ports through your firewall. You can either not do either of those if it's a port you don't want exposed or as @[email protected] says below you can ensure it's only mapped to localhost (or an otherwise non-public) IP.