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I need to enforce on ECS Fargate services 'readonlyrootFileSystem' to reduce Security hub vulnerabilities.

I thought it was an easy task by just setting it true in the task definition.

But it backfired as the service does not deploy because the commands in the dockerfile are not executed because they do not have access to folders and also this is incompatible with ssm execute commands, so I won't be able to get inside the container.

I managed to set the readonlyrootFileSystem To true and have my service back on by mounting a volume. To do I mounted a tmp volume that is used by the container to install dependencies at start and a data volume to store data (updates).

So now according to the documentation the security hub vulnerability should be fixed as the rule needs that variable not be False but still security hub is flagging the task as non complaint.

---More update---

the task definition of my service spins also a datadog image for monitoring. That also needs to have its filesystem as readonly to satisfy security hub.

Here I cannot solve as above because datadog agent needs access to /etc/ folder and if I mount a volume there I will lose files and the service wont' start.

is there a way out of this?

Any ideas?

bruvio
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  • It sounds like your application is not compatible with a read-only filesystem, because it actually needs to write files to the file system as part of the normal activity that it does. It sounds like you are trying to implement security findings that don't really apply to your application. – Mark B Oct 28 '22 at 13:14

1 Answers1

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In case someone stumbles into this. The solution (or workaround, call it as you please), was to set readonlyrootFileSystem True for both container and sidecard (datadog in this case) and use bind mounts.

The rules for monitoring ECS using datadog can be found here

The bind mount that you need to add for your service depend on how you have setup your dockerfile.

in my case it was about adding a volume for downloading data.

Moreover since with readonly FS ECS exec (SSM) does not work, if you want this you also have to add mounts: if added two mounts in /var/lib/amazon and /var/log/amazon. This will allow to have ssm (docker exec basically into your container)

As for datadog, I just needed to fix the mounts so that the agent could work. In my case, since it was again a custom image, I mounted a volume on /etc/datadog-agent.

happy days!

bruvio
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