ContainerGuard: A Real-Time Attack Detection System in Container-Based Big Data Platform

Abstract

As a lightweight, flexible, and high-performance operating system virtualization, containers are used to speed up the big data platform. However, due to the imperfection of the resource isolation mechanism and the property of shared kernel, the meltdown and spectre attacks can lead to information leakage of kernel space and coresident containers. In this article, a noise-resilient and real-time detection system, named ContainerGuard, is proposed to detect meltdown and spectre attacks in the container-based big data platform. ContainerGuard uses a nonintrusive manner to collect lifecycle multivariate time-series performance event data of processes in containers and then uses ensemble of variational autoencoders as generative neural networks to learn the robust representations of normal patterns. Therefore, ContainerGuard meets the urgent need for information protection in the container-based big data platform. Our evaluations using real-world datasets show that ContainerGuard achieves excellent detection performance and only introduces about 4.5% of running performance overhead to the platform.