Book Image

Learn Kubernetes Security

By : Kaizhe Huang, Pranjal Jumde
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Kubernetes Security

5 (1)
By: Kaizhe Huang, Pranjal Jumde

Overview of this book

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration platform for managing containerized applications. Despite widespread adoption of the technology, DevOps engineers might be unaware of the pitfalls of containerized environments. With this comprehensive book, you'll learn how to use the different security integrations available on the Kubernetes platform to safeguard your deployments in a variety of scenarios. Learn Kubernetes Security starts by taking you through the Kubernetes architecture and the networking model. You'll then learn about the Kubernetes threat model and get to grips with securing clusters. Throughout the book, you'll cover various security aspects such as authentication, authorization, image scanning, and resource monitoring. As you advance, you'll learn about securing cluster components (the kube-apiserver, CoreDNS, and kubelet) and pods (hardening image, security context, and PodSecurityPolicy). With the help of hands-on examples, you'll also learn how to use open source tools such as Anchore, Prometheus, OPA, and Falco to protect your deployments. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of container security and be able to protect your clusters from cyberattacks and mitigate cybersecurity threats.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Kubernetes
7
Section 2: Securing Kubernetes Deployments and Clusters
14
Section 3: Learning from Mistakes and Pitfalls

Configuring the security attributes of pods

As we mentioned in the previous chapter, application developers should be aware of what privileges a microservice must have in order to perform tasks. Ideally, application developers and security engineers work together to harden the microservice at the pod and container level by configuring the security context provided by Kubernetes.

We classify the major security attributes into four categories:

  • Setting host namespaces for pods
  • Security context at the container level
  • Security context at the pod level
  • AppArmor profile

By employing such a means of classification, you will find them easy to manage.

Setting host-level namespaces for pods

The following attributes in the pod specification are used to configure the use of host namespaces:

  • hostPID: By default, this is false. Setting it to true allows the pod to have visibility on all the processes in the worker node.
  • hostNetwork: By default, this...