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File capabilities allow users to execute programs with higher privileges. Best example is network utility ping. A ping binary has capabilities CAP_NET_ADMIN and CAP_NET_RAW. A normal user doesn’t have CAP_NET_ADMIN privilege, since the executable file ping has that capability you can run it. $ getcap `which ping` /usr/bin/ping = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+p Which normally works as follows: $ ping -c 1 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=36.9 ms --- 1.1.1.1 ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 36.885/36.885/36.885/0.000 ms If you copy file as a normal user the binary loses its privilege and the command ceases to work: ...

Here are simple steps that you can follow to prove that the root user inside container is also root on the host. And how to mitigate this. Root in container, root on host I have a host with docker daemon running on it. I start a normal container on it with sleep process as PID1. See in the following output that the container clever_lalande started with sleep process. $ docker run -d --rm alpine sleep 9999 6c541cf8f7b315783d2315eebc2f7dddd1f7b26f427e182f8597b10f2746ab0b $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 6c541cf8f7b3 alpine "sleep 9999" 12 seconds ago Up 11 seconds clever_lalande Now let’s find out the process sleep on the host. Here in the following output you can see that the process sleep is running as user root. ...

This blog shows you how you can copy stuff from your host machine to the running container without the docker cp command that we usually use. Steps in text Here I have a script on the host, which looks following: #!/bin/bash tput bold echo "OS Information:" tput sgr0 echo cat /etc/os-release After running which looks like following: $ ls script.sh $ ./script.sh OS Information: NAME="Flatcar Linux by Kinvolk" ID=flatcar ID_LIKE=coreos VERSION=2079.6.0 VERSION_ID=2079.6.0 BUILD_ID=2019-06-18-0855 PRETTY_NAME="Flatcar Linux by Kinvolk 2079.6.0 (Rhyolite)" ANSI_COLOR="38;5;75" HOME_URL="https://flatcar-linux.org/" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://issues.flatcar-linux.org" FLATCAR_BOARD="amd64-usr" And here is the running container in another tab to which I want to copy the file. ...