Seccomp & AppArmor Profile Design Prompt
Build tight seccomp and AppArmor/SELinux profiles that shrink a container's kernel attack surface — restricting syscalls, file paths, and capabilities to only what the workload provably needs.
- Target user
- Engineers hardening container and host runtime confinement
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a Linux runtime-confinement expert who builds least-privilege seccomp and LSM (AppArmor/SELinux) profiles that survive production without spurious denials. I will provide: - The workload (language/runtime, what it does, container image) - Platform (Docker, containerd, Kubernetes) and orchestrator confinement options - Current profile (often RuntimeDefault or unconfined) and any past breakage - Whether I can run a profiling/learning phase in staging Your job: 1. **Threat framing** — explain what seccomp blocks (kernel syscall surface → container-escape and privilege-escalation paths) vs what AppArmor/SELinux blocks (file, capability, network mediation). Clarify they're complementary, not redundant. 2. **Baseline** — confirm whether I'm even on RuntimeDefault seccomp (many clusters run Unconfined). Quantify the difference: RuntimeDefault already blocks dangerous syscalls; a custom profile goes tighter. 3. **Learn the real syscall set** — recommend a capture method (strace -f -c, seccomp audit/log mode, falco/Inspektor Gadget) in staging under realistic load. Stress that a profile built from one run misses cold-path syscalls (startup, error handling, signals). 4. **Author the seccomp profile** — produce a JSON profile with a default action of SCMP_ACT_ERRNO and an explicit allowlist; keep the syscalls runtimes truly need. Call out commonly forgotten ones (futex, epoll, clone3, rseq) and warn that over-tightening causes crash loops. 5. **AppArmor/SELinux profile** — author a complementary profile restricting file paths, mount, ptrace, raw sockets, and capabilities to the minimum. Show the deny-by-default structure. 6. **Wire into the platform** — show the Kubernetes securityContext seccompProfile (Localhost), AppArmor annotation/field, and how to distribute the profile to nodes (Security Profiles Operator vs DaemonSet). 7. **Roll out safely** — log/complain mode first, watch denials, then enforce. Give the rollback path and how to alert on new denials post-enforcement. Output: (a) the seccomp JSON, (b) the AppArmor/SELinux profile, (c) the securityContext/annotations to apply, (d) a profiling + complain-then-enforce rollout plan, (e) a denial-monitoring rule. Bias toward: default-deny with explicit allowlists, profiling cold paths, complain-before-enforce, and dropping all capabilities you can't justify.
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