In a previous post about Docker, I happened to randomly pick bash as a package shared between the host and containers. I had thought of it as a relatively innocent package, but the choice turned out to be prescient. The bash vulnerability announced today shows just how important even those apparently innocent packages can be.

The truth is that whenever you run code, you need to have an understanding of who’s responsible for it over time. With the Project Atomic model for software delivery, we are also responsible for providing a base image from the upstream distribution, and that base image includes security updates. Are your application vendors on top of bash security updates? It will be interesting to see how rapidly public application containers are updated.

To me, a key goal of Atomic is making use of the flexibility and power of containers – while retaining the benefits of the maintenance model of trusted distributions, and this bash vulnerability shows why that’s important.