How does the dashboard know who you are?
The Kubernetes Dashboard is a powerful web application for quickly accessing your cluster from inside a browser. It lets you browse your namespaces and view the status of nodes, and even provides a shell you can use to access Pods directly. There is a fundamental difference between using the dashboard and kubectl. The dashboard, being a web application, needs to manage your session, whereas kubectl does not. This means there's a different set of security issues during deployment that are often not accounted for, leading to severe consequences. In this section, we'll explore how the dashboard identifies users and interacts with the API server.
Dashboard architecture
Before diving into the specifics of how the dashboard authenticates a user, it's important to understand the basics of how the dashboard works. The dashboard at a high level has three layers: