  Cloud-based infrastructures have grown in popularity over the last decade
leveraging virtualisation, server, storage, compute power and network
components to develop flexible applications. The requirements for instantaneous
deployment and reduced costs have led the shift from virtual machine deployment
to containerisation, increasing the overall flexibility of applications and
increasing performances. However, containers require a fully fleshed operating
system to execute, increasing the attack surface of an application. Unikernels,
on the other hand, provide a lightweight memory footprint, ease of application
packaging and reduced start-up times. Moreover, Unikernels reduce the attack
surface due to the self-contained environment only enabling low-level features.
In this work, we provide an exhaustive description of the unikernel ecosystem;
we demonstrate unikernel vulnerabilities and further discuss the security
implications of Unikernel-enabled environments through different use-cases.
