Book Image

The Kubernetes Book

By : Nigel Poulton, Pushkar Joglekar
Book Image

The Kubernetes Book

By: Nigel Poulton, Pushkar Joglekar

Overview of this book

Kubernetes is the leading orchestrator of cloud-native apps. With knowledge of how to work with Kubernetes, you can easily deploy and manage applications on the cloud or in your on-premises data center. The book begins by introducing you to Kubernetes and showing you how to install it. You’ll learn how to use Kubernetes Services and bring stable and reliable networking to apps that are deployed on Kubernetes. You'll delve deep into the powerful storage subsystem of Kubernetes and learn how to leverage the variety of external storage backends in your applications. As the book progresses, it shows you how to use features such as DaemonSets, Helm, and RBAC to enhance your Kubernetes applications. You'll explore the six categories of identifying vulnerabilities and look at a few ways to prevent and mitigate them. You'll also look at ways to secure the software delivery pipeline by discussing some image-related best practices. The book ends by sharing with you some resources that’ll help take your Kubernetes knowledge to the next level. By the end of the book, you’ll have the confidence and skills to leverage all the features of Kubernetes to develop scalable applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Chapter 1
3
Chapter 2
5
Chapter 3
7
Chapter 4
9
Chapter 5
11
Chapter 6
13
Chapter 7
15
Chapter 8
17
Chapter 9
19
Chapter 10
21
Chapter 11

Elevation of Privilege

Elevation of privilege, also known as privilege escalation, is gaining higher access than what should be granted, usually in order to cause damage or gain unauthorized access.

Let's look at a few ways to prevent this in a Kubernetes environment.

Protecting the API server

Kubernetes offers several authorization modes that help safeguard access to the API server. These include:

  • RBAC mode
  • Webhook mode
  • Node mode

You should run multiple authorizers at the same time. For example, a common best practice is to always have RBAC and node enabled.

RBAC mode lets us restrict API operations to sub-sets of users. These users can be regular user accounts as well as system services. The idea is that all requests to the API server must be authenticated and authorized. Authentication ensures that requests are coming from a validated user – the user performing the request is who they claim to be. Authorization ensures the validated...