Secure MCP Server Deployment Using Docker Containers
The tool we built to allow an assistant to manage containers ultimately became a potential security risk, as it could have given someone access to the entire host.
We built an MCP server that let an internal assistant restart flaky services, tail logs, and clean up dangling containers on a shared dev box. Genuinely useful, it saved the on-call rotation a significant chunk of tedious babysitting. To make the 'restart this container' tool work, someone mounted /var/run/docker.sock directly into the MCP server container. It worked immediately, which should have been the first warning sign. A security review by a colleague who does red teaming on the side revealed that we had essentially given a text-driven agent root-equivalent access to the entire host, as anything that can communicate with the Docker socket can create a privileged container and escape its sandbox. Nobody had done anything malicious. But the tool could impact...
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