Docker Security Benchmark Checker

The Docker Security Benchmark Checker is a script that checks for all the automatable tests included in the CIS Docker 1.6 Benchmark. We are releasing this as a follow-up to our Understanding Docker Security and Best Practices blog post.

We are making this available as an open-source utility so the Docker community can have an easy way to self-assess their hosts and docker containers against this benchmark.

Running the benchmark

We packaged this benchmark as a small container for your convenience. Note that this container is being run with a lot of privilege -- sharing the host's filesystem, pid and network namespaces, due to portions of the benchmark applying to the running host.

The easiest way to run your hosts against the CIS Docker 1.6 benchmark is by running our pre-built container:

docker run -it --net host --pid host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-v /usr/lib/systemd:/usr/lib/systemd -v /etc:/etc --label security-benchmark \
diogomonica/docker-security-benchmark

This benchmark requires Docker 1.6 or later to run, since it depends on the --label to exclude the current container from being inspected. If you can't upgrade to 1.6, I feel free to remove the --label flag or run the shell script locally (see below).

Building the benchmark

If you wish to build and run this container yourself, you can follow the following steps:

git clone https://github.com/diogomonica/docker-security-benchmark.git
cd docker-security-benchmark; docker build -t docker-security-benchmark .
docker run -it --net host --pid host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-v /usr/lib/systemd:/usr/lib/systemd -v /etc:/etc --label security-benchmark \
docker-security-benchmark

Also, this script can also be simply run from your base host by running:

git clone https://github.com/diogomonica/docker-security-benchmark.git
cd docker-security-benchmark; sh docker_security_benchmark.sh

This script was build to be POSIX 2004 compliant, so it should be portable across any Unix platform.