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

Threat modeling application in Kubernetes

Now that we have looked at threats in a Kubernetes cluster, let's move on to discuss how threat modeling will differ for an application deployed on Kubernetes. Deployment in Kubernetes adds additional complexities to the threat model. Kubernetes adds additional considerations, assets, threat actors, and new security controls that need to be considered before investigating the threats to the deployed application.

Let's look at a simple example of a three-tier web application:

Figure 3.4 – Threat model of a traditional web application

The same application looks a little different in the Kubernetes environment:

Figure 3.5 – Threat model of the three-tier web application in Kubernetes

As shown in the previous diagram, the web server, application server, and databases are all running inside pods. Let's do a high-level comparison of threat modeling between traditional...