NIST releases Draft NISTIR 8176, Security Assurance Requirements for Linux Application Container Deployments

Application Containers are slowly finding adoption in enterprise IT infrastructures. To address security concerns associated with deployment of application container platforms, NIST Special Publication 800-190 (2nd Draft), Application Container Security Guide, identified security threats to the components of the platform hosting the containers and related artifacts involved in building, storing and using container images. It has also proposed countermeasures for the following components: Hardware, Host OS, Container Runtime, Image, Registry and Orchestrator.

To implement the countermeasures one or more security solutions are needed. To assess the effectiveness of the security solutions implemented based on these recommendations, it is necessary to analyze them and outline the security assurance requirements they must satisfy to meet their intended objectives. This is the contribution of Draft NIST Internal Report (NISTIR) 8176, which focuses on application containers on Linux platforms.

Comments are due August 25, 2017; they may be submitted to NISTIR8176@nist.gov. 

For full details and a link to the document.