setcap-static is a statically linked trimmed down version of setcap(8). It sets the capabilities of the given filename to the capabilities specified.

KubeSec security guidelines suggest that the running image should be "run as a non-root user to ensure the least privilege." However, if the containerized application needs some root privileges (like binding to a port less than 1024) and runs in a scratch image, this will not be straightforward.

The issue is that Docker's COPY command does not preserve the extended attributes; therefore, you cannot do something like this:

FROM alpine:3.13 as build

# ...

RUN \
    apk add --no-cache libcap \
    && setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' my-cool-application \
    && apk del --no-cache libcap

# ...

FROM scratch
COPY --from=build /path/to/my-cool-application /my-cool-application

In the target image, my-cool-application will not have the capabilities set in the build image. Therefore, if you need to grant some capabilities to your application, you have to do it in the target image. You cannot just copy setcap from Alpine — because it is a dynamically linked executable (it depends on ld-musl, libcap, libc.musl).

Here comes libcap-static. It is a lightweight version of libcap: it can only set the capabilities on a file, it does not support all other options of libcap.

Unlike libcap, libcap-static has an option to delete itself: this can be handy for scratch images if you don't want to leave any other executables than your application visible to the user (or an attacker). If libcap-static detects that the first two characters of argv[0] are /!, it will delete itself after the successful operation.

For example,

FROM scratch
COPY --from=wildwildangel/setcap-static /setcap-static /!setcap-static
COPY --from=build /build/build/tiny-ssh-honeypot /tiny-ssh-honeypot
RUN ["/!setcap-static", "cap_net_bind_service=+ep", "/tiny-ssh-honeypot"]

After granting the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability to tiny-ssh-honeypot, libcap-static will delete itself.

Build dependencies:

• Alpine: cmake, make, libcap-dev, libcap-static
• Ubuntu: cmake, make, libcap-dev

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel
cmake --build build --config MinSizeRel

setcap-static capabilities filename

• capabilities is the list of capabilities in the form supported by cap_from_text(3) (or by setcap)
• filename is the name of the file to operate on; it must not refer to a symlink.