LXC, trust of default templates

gsmitheidw

Member
Jan 28, 2020
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Republic of Ireland
A friend starting into using Proxmox asked me a question today which I didn't offhand know the answer to and couldn't find a definitive answer on here.
How do you know the LXC templates are trustworthy?

LXC containers (as in the templates pulled down from pveam), I'm guessing they're pulled from here: http://download.proxmox.com/images/system/
But who makes those? (I mean the system templates not the turnkey ones). How can we be reasonably sure there's no malware creeped in from whoever built them?
I went digging around and my guess is the images hosted by Proxmox are ones that are tested supportable subset of those taken from linuxcontainers.org?
Does Debian project have any security input into the Debian template for example?

I don't see any sha256 checksums or equivalent - or verification process? Maybe there is one behind the scenes checking akin to apt & gpg?
[edit]
I've answered this part myself by seeing a checksum when it goes wrong in this thread: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/checksum-errors-downloading-lxc-templates.89384/

I have seen some threads on here about creating your own templates, but looks fairly longwinded and much of the process looks to use very old versions.

Many devs seem happy to run a docker image built by some $RandomInternetPerson, but I think with Sysadmins we're a bit more likely to ask these sort of questions. Most of the security in the help/wiki is in the context of isolation between guest and host rather than trusting the guest is inherently clean to begin with.
 
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