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Enhancing security of containers in Linux

Reading time12 min
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In any history textbooks, the modern time has already been called the time of the next change of the industrial structure or the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). The main role, in this case, is given to information and IT systems. In an attempt to reduce the cost of IT infrastructure, unify and accelerate the process of developing IT solutions, humanity first invented "clouds" in order to replace traditional data centers, and then containers to replace virtual machines.

Clearly, containers appear more vulnerable from a security point of view. What are the advantages of containerization over virtualization? In fact, there are quite a lot of them:

the possibility of more flexible use of available resources (no need to backup them as in the case of virtual machines);

the ability to save resources (no need to spend them on many copies of the OS for each virtual machine);

no delays at startup (just start of the process is almost instantaneous compared to the time needed to load the virtual machine);

 the interaction between processes, even if isolated, is much easier to implement when needed than between virtual machines. That is how, by the way, came the concept of microservices, which has recently become very popular.

All of the above led to the very rapid development of container technologies, despite the recurring problems with the security of already deployed container cloud systems, their hacks, and data leaks. Accordingly, the work on strengthening container security is also continuing. This is what will be discussed further in this article.

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Comparing Huawei ExaGear to Apple's Rosetta 2 and Microsoft's solution

Reading time7 min
Views3.9K

November 10, 2020 was in many ways a landmark event in the microprocessor industry: Apple unveiled its new Mac Mini, the main feature of which was the new M1 chip, developed in-house. It is not an exaggeration to say that this processor is a landmark achievement for the ARM ecosystem: finally an ARM architecture chip whose performance surpassed x86 architecture chips from competitors such as Intel, a niche that had been dominated for decades.

But the main interest for us is not the M1 processor itself, but the Rosetta 2 binary translation technology. This allows the user to run legacy x86 software that has not been migrated to the ARM architecture. Apple has a lot of experience in developing binary translation solutions and is a recognized leader in this area. The first version of the Rosetta binary translator appeared in 2006 were it aided Apple in the transition from PowerPC to x86 architecture. Although this time platforms were different from those of 2006, it was obvious that all the experience that Apple engineers had accumulated over the years, was not lost, but used to develop the next version - Rosetta 2.

We were keen to compare this new solution from Apple, a similar product Huawei ExaGear (with its lineage from Eltechs ExaGear) developed by our team. At the same time, we evaluated the performance of binary translation from x86 to Arm provided by Microsoft (part of MS Windows 10 for Arm devices) on the Huawei MateBook E laptop. At present, these are the only other x86 to Arm binary translation solution that we are aware of on the open market.

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