Benchmarking Docker Seccomp & AppArmor Profiles (8402)

Technical Overview

Engineering breakdown of Benchmarking Docker Seccomp & AppArmor Profiles (8402). Bare-metal hardware performance requires isolated kernel parameters, syscall filtering, and mandatory access control (MAC) policies. This article walks through the methodology, tooling, and results of a systematic benchmark suite executed on Votion Cloud's edge nodes.

Test Environment

• Hardware: 2× Intel Xeon Silver 4314, 64 GB DDR4, NVMe SSD
• OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (kernel 5.15)
• Docker: 24.0.7, containerd 1.7.2
• Profiles: Default Seccomp, Custom Seccomp (allow‑list), Default AppArmor, Hardened AppArmor (deny‑by‑default)

Benchmark Methodology

We used sysbench for CPU/memory, fio for I/O, and netperf for network throughput. Each workload ran inside a container with a specific security profile. Metrics collected: latency (p99), throughput, syscall overhead (via perf stat -e syscalls:sys_enter_*), and context‑switch count.

Key Findings

• Seccomp allow‑list adds ~1.2 % CPU overhead vs. unconfined, but reduces syscall surface by 78 %.
• Hardened AppArmor incurs ~3.5 % latency increase on I/O‑heavy workloads due to path‑based mediation.
• Network throughput remains within 0.8 % of baseline for all profiles.
• Context‑switch count rises proportionally to the number of denied syscalls.

Recommendations for Edge Deployments

1. Adopt a minimal Seccomp allow‑list tailored to the container's binary set.
2. Use AppArmor profiles generated via aa-genprof and then prune to deny‑by‑default.
3. Profile‑gate CI pipelines: fail builds if syscall overhead exceeds 2 %.
4. Monitor seccomp and apparmor audit logs in real time using Votion's telemetry stack.