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

The Privilege escalation issue in role parsing – CVE-2019-11247

We discussed RBAC in detail in Chapter 7, Authentication, Authorization, and Admission Control. Roles and RoleBindings allow users to get the privileges to perform certain actions. These privileges are namespaced. If a user needs a cluster-wide privilege, ClusterRoles and ClusterRolebindings are used. This issue allowed users to make cluster-wide modifications even if their privileges were namespaced. Configurations for admission controllers, such as Open Policy Access, could be modified by users with a namespaced role.

Mitigation strategy

You can use the following strategies to harden your cluster against this issue and issues similar to CVE-2019-11247 that haven't yet been found:

  • Avoid wildcards in Roles and RoleBindings: Roles and ClusterRoles should be specific to the resource names, verbs, and API groups. Adding * to roles can allow users to have access to resources that they should not...