Introduction

I first started looking into containers as a way to scale training environments for BroCon 2014. We were trying to find a more sufficient solution to teach the Bro programming language that involved less setup time. We found that we can have hundreds of training environments on a single host, rather than distributing large virtual machine files to all conference users. Upon some research and experimentation, I found that Linux containers were a good solution to this problem. I have since explored ways to further apply this technology to other remote areas, which include deploying secure containers for training and development. This short book is intended to present concepts and to spark ideas rather than be a walkthrough or tutorial of software. My name is Jon Schipp; I’m a Security Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The NCSA takes advantage of high-performance computing to facilitate scientific research. I am also the Director of Security at Draconyx, a full-service IT consulting business that specializes in information security. In addition, I have contributed to a number of free and open source projects, including the Netsniff-NG Toolkit, Security Onion, and the Bro Project. I am the founder and chair of OpenNSM, which is a weekly network security monitoring group with international participation.