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

A DoS issue in YAML parsing – CVE-2019-11253

XML bombs, or billion laughs attacks, are popular with any XML parsing code. Similar to parsing issues in XML, this was a parsing issue in YAML files that were sent to kube-apiserver. If a YAML file sent to the server has recursive references, it triggers the kube-apiserver to consume CPU resources, which causes availability issues on the API server. In most cases, requests parsed by kube-apiserver are restricted to authenticated users, so unauthenticated users should not be able to trigger this issue. There was an exception to this rule in the Kubernetes versions preceding 1.14 that allowed unauthenticated users to check whether they could perform an action using kubectl auth can-i.

This issue is similar to CVE-2019-1002100, but is more severe as unauthenticated users can also trigger this issue.

Mitigation strategy

You can use the following strategies to harden your cluster against this issue and issues similar to CVE...