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

Least privilege of Kubernetes subjects

Kubernetes service accounts, users, and groups communicate with kube-apiserver to manage Kubernetes objects. With RBAC enabled, different users or service accounts may have different privileges to operate Kubernetes objects. For example, users in the system:master group have the cluster-admin role granted, meaning they can manage the entire Kubernetes cluster, while users in the system:kube-proxy group can only access the resources required by the kube-proxy component. First, let's briefly talk about what RBAC is.

Introduction to RBAC

As discussed earlier, RBAC is a model of regulating access to resources based on roles granted to users or groups. From version 1.6 onward, RBAC is enabled by default in Kubernetes. Before version 1.6, RBAC could be enabled by running the Application Programming Interface (API) server with the --authorization-mode=RBAC flag. RBAC eases the dynamic configuration of permission policies using the API server...