Book Image

Kubernetes Secrets Handbook

By : Emmanouil Gkatziouras, Rom Adams, Chen Xi
Book Image

Kubernetes Secrets Handbook

By: Emmanouil Gkatziouras, Rom Adams, Chen Xi

Overview of this book

Securing Secrets in containerized apps poses a significant challenge for Kubernetes IT professionals. This book tackles the critical task of safeguarding sensitive data, addressing the limitations of Kubernetes encryption, and establishing a robust Secrets management system for heightened security for Kubernetes. Starting with the fundamental Kubernetes architecture principles and how they apply to the design of Secrets management, this book delves into advanced Kubernetes concepts such as hands-on security, compliance, risk mitigation, disaster recovery, and backup strategies. With the help of practical, real-world guidance, you’ll learn how to mitigate risks and establish robust Secrets management as you explore different types of external secret stores, configure them in Kubernetes, and integrate them with existing Secrets management solutions. Further, you'll design, implement, and operate a secure method of managing sensitive payload by leveraging real use cases in an iterative process to enhance skills, practices, and analytical thinking, progressively strengthening the security posture with each solution. By the end of this book, you'll have a rock-solid Secrets management solution to run your business-critical applications in a hybrid multi-cloud scenario, addressing operational risks, compliance, and controls.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Introduction to Kubernetes Secrets Management
6
Part 2: Advanced Topics – Kubernetes Secrets in a Production Environment
10
Part 3: Kubernetes Secrets Providers

Kubernetes-native encryption

Data in payloads written in etcd is not encrypted but encoded in base64, which is almost equivalent to clear text. Encrypting the data contained in the payload will protect from the aforementioned protection mechanisms, but not replace them!

Interestingly enough, we have established that our Kubernetes key-value store, also known as etcd, does not provide any encryption capabilities except for the networking part, nor does Kubernetes provide advanced KMS capabilities as HashiCorp Vault or Azure Key Vault would.

However, the Kubernetes project has designed a KMS framework within kube-apiserver, the service validating and configuring data for the API objects, to leverage one of the following encryption providers:

  • The identity provider is the default configuration, meaning no encryption is applied to the data field encoded in base64
  • The aes provider, with two options being aesgcm or aescbc, leverages the local encryption capabilities with...