Join developers across the globe for live and virtual events led by Red Hat technology experts. OPA can interact with dynamic requests from outsiders. Kubernetes events can indicate any Kubernetes resource state changes and errors, such as exceeded resource quota or pending pods, as well as any informational messages. Automate your cloud provisioning, application deployment, configuration management, and more with this simple yet powerful automation engine. The mesh can automatically encrypt and decrypt requests and responses, removing that burden from the application developer. First, you must monitor the most security-relevant container activities, including: Observing container behavior to detect anomalies is generally easier in containers than in virtual machines because of the declarative nature of containers and Kubernetes. Customers have a rich selection of open source security tools to choose from, and our survey results show that no single open source security tool dominates the Kubernetes security market. Kubernetes is, first and foremost, a tool for development and DevOps teams to accelerate and scale containerized application development, deployment, and management. This does not apply for non-resource requests. A Kubernetes cluster consists of control plane components and nodes as diagrammed in Figure 1. Pod Security Policies address several critical security use cases, including: Hardening containers at runtime gives security teams the ability to detect and respond to threats and anomalies while the containers or workloads are in a running state. the ability to manage and rotate secrets centrally. Many source code repositories provide scanning capabilities (e.g. Terrascan is a dynamic analysis tool that runs as its own process and interacts with its target. The container runtime is the software that is responsible for running containers. According to our recent surveyof IT decision-makers, security is the biggest area of concern relating to container adoption, with security issues causing application deployment delays among 54% of the respondents. Make etcd accessible only via the Kubernetes API with correct permissions by putting restrictions on firewalls such as iptables and netfilters for etcd instances and authenticated access between API and etcd. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. The tools do not try to remediate problems, but just report them. Kubernetes provides a number of in-built mechanisms for API server authentication, however these are likely only suitable for non-production or small clusters. Join the kubernetes-announce group (The State of Kubernetes Security in 2023 - Red Hat The security context establishes the security parameters that are assigned to each pod or container. These controls can eliminate entire classes of attacks that depend on privileged access. The Kubernetes control plane consists of the core services that keep the whole cluster up and running. This means you need to create container images with an application executable and dependencies. Reduce Attack Surface: Select an image from a container that has the minimal amount of software packages available. It also enables you to provide developers with actionable, context-rich guidelines integrated into existing workflows, along with tooling to support developer productivity. This means its vital to not leave essential data on the node filesystem. All parts of an API request must be allowed by some policy in order to proceed. OPA is also lavish in features. Read Guide > 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey. Find out how CrowdStrike detected a new vulnerability in the Kubernetes container engine, and worked along side their team to patch the security issue and protect their customers: Read about the cr8escape Vulnerability. Red Hat's The State of Kubernetes Security for 2023 report looks at the specific security risks organizations face regarding cloud-native development, including risks to their software supply chain, and how they mitigate these risks to protect their applications and IT environments. Kubernetes is an extensible platform with various security vulnerabilities and unclear security perimeters. Kubernetes security is a collection of best practices designed to keep the Kubernetes environment secure from cloud threats and vulnerabilities. kube-bench can run statically, like KubeLinter, but can also do its scan against a running cluster. Do not mount the service account credentials in a container if it does not need to access the Kubernetes API. 23% of respondents use Kube-hunter. Containerized applications typically make extensive use of cluster networking, and observing active networking traffic is a good way to understand how applications interact with each other and identify unexpected communication. Checkov can run hundreds of scans against a Kubernetes cluster. The open source project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Along with the many advantages, Service mesh also brings in its set of challenges, few of them are listed below: There are numerous projects which are able to provide centralized policy management for a Kubernetes cluster, most predominantly the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project, Kyverno, or Validating Admission Policy (a built-in, yet alpha (aka off by default) feature as of 1.26). OPA can be used to build policies that require, for example, all container images to be from trusted sources, that prevent developers from running software as root, that make sure storage is always marked with the encrypt bit, that storage does not get deleted just because a pod gets restarted, that limits internet access, etc. 2. Therefore, it comes with many risks in terms of creating a secure production-ready cluster. Running in multiple zones. Kubernetes security context. Third-party Authentication: Integrate an external authentication provider and use already-defined user groups for authorization to access your Kubernetes API. Enable Audit logging: Ensure that audit logging is enabled and available, even if the cluster is deleted. One main challenge with logging Kubernetes is understanding what logs are generated and how to use them. etcd is a critical Kubernetes component which stores information on state and secrets, and it should be protected differently from the rest of your cluster. Review the secret material present on the container against the principle of 'least priviledge', and to assess the risk posed by a compromise. Prevent unapproved images from being used with the admission controller ImagePolicyWebhook to reject pods that use unapproved images including: New vulnerabilities are published every day and containers might include outdated packages with recently-disclosed vulnerabilities (CVEs). Kubernetes Security as Part of a Comprehensive Cloud Exposure Management Solution. Falco Use SELinux options for more fine-grained process controls. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method of regulating access to computer or network resources based on the roles of individual users within your organization. For example, systemd logs can be retrieved using the following command: On the level of the Kubernetes cluster itself, there is a long list of cluster components that can be logged as well as additional data types that can be used (events, audit logs). With the latest trends in software development, the build and release of applications and container images are done in pipelines like Jenkins, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to deliver faster with less effort. For more information, refer to the documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/controlling-access/. Then you can identify and respond to security policy violations. These attributes allow easier introspection into what you have deployed and its expected activity. provides a number of benefits over using Kubernetes Secrets, including the ability to manage secrets across multiple clusters (or clouds), and It makes sure that containers are running in a Pod, kube-proxy is a network proxy that runs on each node in your cluster, implementing part of the Kubernetes Service concept. In parallel, the Kubernetes community has been very active in releasing open source security tools to fill in the security gaps present in Kubernetes. Most of the tools in this article report a vulnerability if you use the host system's address. It uses a declarative policy language purpose built for writing and enforcing rules such as, Alice can write to this repository, or Bob can update this account. It comes with a rich suite of tooling to help developers integrate those policies into their applications and even allow the applications end users to contribute policy for their tenants as well. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (ACS) for Kubernetes is the pioneering Kubernetes-native security platform, equipping organizations to more securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications. Some are static, examining your manifests (configurations). Now Falco offers a powerful analysis tool for Kubernetes, hooked into Kubernetes by the Kubernetes audit logging facility. It improves the signal to noise of scanners (e.g. We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge. An empty image, ideal for statically compiled languages like Go. Detecting attacks, unpatched software, anomalous behavior, and breaches as soon as possible goes a long way in . You can add policies and control OPA through either an API or a CLI. These help you track all activities in chronological order. Set short lifetimes on certificates and automate their rotation. Logically, each controller is a separate process, but to reduce complexity, they are all compiled into a single binary and run in a single process. Kubernetes, It has become impossible to track all potential attack vectors. An option of running resource-unbound containers puts your system in risk of DoS or noisy neighbor scenarios. It consists of components such as kubelet, kube-proxy and container runtime. A service mesh provides security features aimed at securing the services inside your network and quickly identifying any compromising traffic entering your cluster. But some CIS steps can't be fully automated. Some offer just a command-line interface (CLI), whereas some also offer an API for integration into automated environments. Such resources would be accessible to any user who had access to the unencrypted container filesystem, whether during build, at rest in a registry or backup, or running. This means that Kubernetes authorization works with existing organization-wide or cloud-provider-wide access control systems which may handle other APIs besides the Kubernetes API. But again, this will only apply to the cluster but not outside the cluster. Image Scanning: Make sure to have an image scanning tool that will help you identify vulnerabilities present within an image throughout the CI/CD Pipeline. Note that some components and installation methods may enable local ports over HTTP and administrators should familiarize themselves with the settings of each component to identify potentially unsecured traffic. Like some of the other tools in this article, Clair checks each dependency against public databases that list software vulnerabilities. etcd is a consistent and highly-available key-value store used as Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster data. This will encrypt Secret resources in etcd, preventing parties that gain access to your etcd backups from viewing the content of those secrets. Upgrading containers is extremely easy with the Kubernetes rolling updates feature - this allows gradually updating a running application by upgrading its images to the latest version. OPA is a general-purpose, domain-agnostic policy enforcement tool. Learn more about namespaces at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/namespaces. Like some of the other tools in this article, Clair checks each dependency against public databases that list software vulnerabilities. Complete Kubernetes Logging Guide series: Kubernetes is a complex platform with an active community and an ever-changing environment, with new plugins and infrastructure extensions. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security delivers Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM) capabilities to ensure the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure remains hardened and protected. Do not run application processes as root. 8. It is thus a static analysis tool, like other linters. It has been adopted by many organizations, who use it to check their own applications and libraries, storing its inventories on their own systems. Tenable helps you take the guesswork out of securing Kubernetes by providing you with the visibility you need to understand what's running and at risk in your Kubernetes environments. It then sends the pods it finds to an available kubelet for scheduling. So, even if youre not embedding OPA to implement application authorization logic (the top use case discussed above), you probably still want control over the APIs microservices. For example, a deployment containing a vulnerability with severity score of 7 or greater should be moved up in remediation priority if that deployment contains privileged containers and is open to the Internet but moved down if its in a test environment and supporting a non-critical app. To protect the control plane, take the following actions: The Kubernetes API is the interface of the control plane for external users, making authentication and authorization crucial parts of security. Build, deliver, and scale containerized apps faster with Kubernetes, sometimes referred to as "k8s" or "k-eights.". Advances in network technology, such as the service mesh, have led to the creation of products like LinkerD and Istio which can enable TLS by default while providing extra telemetry information on transactions between services. This means that the engineers responsible for deploying the Kubernetes platform need to know about all the potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities poor configuration can lead to. Audit logs can be useful for compliance as they should help you answer the questions of what happened, who did what and when. One of the more useful features of Kube-hunter is the ability to exploit the vulnerabilities it discovers to look for further exploits. Kubernetes Security Best Practices everyone must follow -, Security Best Practices for Kubernetes Deployment -, Kubernetes Security 101: Risks and 29 Best Practices -, 15 Kubernetes security best practice to secure your cluster -, The Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Security -, A hacker's guide to Kubernetes security -, 12 Kubernetes configuration best practices -, A Practical Guide to Kubernetes Logging -, Tesla cloud resources are hacked to run cryptocurrency-mining malware -, OPEN POLICY AGENT: CLOUD-NATIVE AUTHORIZATION -, Introducing Policy As Code: The Open Policy Agent (OPA) -, Three Technical Benefits of Service Meshes and their Operational Limitations, Part 1 -, Open Policy Agent: What Is OPA and How It Works (Examples) -, Send Kubernetes Metrics To Kibana and Elasticsearch -. Kubernetes events can indicate any Kubernetes resource state changes and errors, such as exceeded resource quota or pending pods, as well as any informational messages. Similarly, if any dependency or library in your application containers has vulnerabilities, attackers can exploit these to access your application and data. Cloud Native Application Development and Delivery Platform, Try hands-on activities in the Developer Sandbox, Deploy a Java application on Kubernetes in minutes, Learn Kubernetes using the Developer Sandbox, Deploy full-stack JavaScript apps to the Developer Sandbox, want a container to use the host's IP address, profiling should be off in the Controller Manager, benchmark created by the Center for Internet Security, interact with dynamic requests from outsiders, OpenShift 4.13: Create serverless functions and more, Automate your Quarkus deployment using Ansible, Improvements to static analysis in the GCC 13 compiler, Build an all-in-one edge manager with single-node OpenShift. A lot of Falco checks are for pods with incorrect privileges. Controls whether a container will be able to write into the root filesystem. The specification and state of the Kubernetes resources are managed by control plane components and stored in etcd, an open-source distributed key/value database. Users of Google Cloud Platform can benefit from automatic firewall rules, preventing cross-cluster communication. While this feature is currently beta, it offers an additional level of defense when backups are not encrypted or an attacker gains read access to etcd. Microsoft Defender for Kubernetes - the benefits and features The Kubernetes security lifecycle covers the complete journey of an application, starting from the source code to a running deployment in Kubernetes. Adoption of a Platform: The invasiveness of service meshes force both developers and operators to adapt to a highly opinionated platform and conform to its rules. The nodes are where the actual workload of the Kubernetes workload runs. If a hacker gains access to your control plane components, they can deploy containers, read secrets or even delete the whole cluster. It creates an inventory of all dependencies used by a container image, scanning the image to make an inventory of all the applications, operating system components, and libraries installed. and leverage deployment labels or annotations to alert the team responsible for a given application when a potential threat is detected. gVisor supports ~70% of the linux system calls from the container but ONLY uses about 20 system calls to the host kernel. Continuously validate the security and trustworthiness of your software supply chain to protect against weaknesses in open source codebases . Learn more about webhook at. 5. Rego is complex, but it allows easy nesting of rules so that you don't have to repeat yourself. Write access to the API server's etcd is equivalent to gaining root on the entire cluster, and even read access can be used to escalate privileges fairly easily. It can also improve performance by prioritizing the reuse of existing, persistent connections, reducing the need for the computationally expensive creation of new ones. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Clair is an open source security tool used for scanning container images for known vulnerabilities. A strong security posture will include regular production scanning, covering first-party containers (applications you have built and previously scanned) and third-party containers (sourced from trusted repository and vendors). It is recommended to harden the underlying hosts by installing the latest version of operating system, hardening the operating system, implement necessary patch management and configuration management system, implementing essential firewall rules and undertake specific security measures depending on the datacenter environment. Open Policy Agent (OPA) is not a vulnerability checker like the previous tools profiled in this article. Installing Kubernetes with kOps. For example, you can opt to have OPA return a True or False JSON object, a number, a string, or even a complex data object. Request - log event metadata and request body but not response body. Deploy your application safely and securely into your production environment without system or resource limitations. . The audit policy object structure is defined in the audit.k8s.io API group. You can even run policies out-of-band to monitor results so that administrators can ensure policy changes dont inadvertently do more damage than good. Kubernetes-related vulnerabilities can be checked through the Container Security Operator. It runs dynamically, with a rich collection of 23 passive and 13 active tests. OPA even offers unit testing, where you submit a request to a policy and test whether the outcome matches your expected outcome. If you pass the tests, you can be fairly confident that your system conforms to the benchmarks (although the CIS terms of service prohibit you from saying so). For instance, Helm Tiller used to be installed on clusters, but it was found to be buggy and is now obsolete. In other words, K8s security is all about keeping your container workloads secure. With its easy-to-use API and developer-friendly characteristics, Kubernetes has become an indispensable part of the cloud ecosystem. Some of the important parameters are as follows: Here is an example for pod definition with security context parameters: For more information on security context for Pods, refer to the documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context. And finally, many organizations are using OPA to regulate use of service mesh architectures. The tools in this article can be classified in a few ways. Kubernetes security is a collection of best practices designed to keep the Kubernetes environment secure from cloud threats and vulnerabilities.. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have become a crucial part of modern software development, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy code changes quickly and As the number of cloud-native workloads and applications increases, managing Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates for each application can become daunting. CVE) and reduces the burden of establishing provenance to just what you need. Required Expertise: Adding a service mesh such as Istio on top of an orchestrator such as Kubernetes often requires operators to become experts in both technologies. A failure in the security assessment should create a failure in the pipeline, preventing images with bad security quality from being pushed to the image registry. Given the nature of admission controllers, you must authorize at least one policy - otherwise no pods will be allowed to be created in the cluster. kube-hunter is another Kubernetes security tool from Aqua, written in Python and released as open source. Falcon Cloud Seucrity delivers containers, Kubernetes, and hosts from build to runtime in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while ensuring security in every step of the CI/CD pipeline. For more information, refer to https://hub.docker.com/_/scratch. Patch releases are cut from those branches at a regular cadence, plus additional urgent releases, when required. The following command returns all events within a specific namespace: The following command will show the latest events for this specific Kubernetes resource: You must integrate security earlier into the container lifecycle and ensure alignment and shared goals between security and DevOps teams. Often times in multi-tenant and highly untrusted clusters an additional layer of sandboxing is required to ensure container breakout and kernel exploits are not present. Kubernetes Security 101: Fundamentals and Best Practices - Sysdig The control plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster. OPA was introduced to create a unified method of enforcing security policy in the stack. This video can't play due to privacy settings, To change your settings, select the "Cookie Preferences" link in the footer and opt in to "Advertising Cookies.". Kubernetes provides flexible auditing of kube-apiserver requests based on policies. They offer other forms of security. Enable RBAC: Ensure that RBAC is enabled and configured correctly, as a slight change in RBAC rules can make your clusters available to the world. For persisting container logs, the common approach is to write logs to a log file and then use a sidecar container. As such, it's one of the most important resources in Kubernetes to secure. Kubernetes infrastructure should be configured securely prior to workloads being deployed. Clair is used by 11% of respondents. This fact is unfortunate as there is nothing more vital than to be aware and on top of potential threats. but not request or response body. Among the dynamic tools, some are passive, which means they do things such as port scans to observe the Kubernetes cluster's behavior. Check your operating system files and configuration, software packages, libraries and binaries, Analyze Dockerfile for security flaws such as exposed ports or privileged access. Do not use the host network or process space - using "hostNetwork:true" will cause NetworkPolicies to be ignored since the Pod will use its host network. 10. KubeLinter runs on the command line and has an easy hook to let you run it automatically on each commit to Git. By shifting security left, vulnerable and misconfigured images can be remediated within the same developer environment with real-time feedback and alerts. The Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service guide makes this easy. With over 500+ Policies for security best practices across various applications, including Terraform, Kubernetes (JSON/YAML), AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and GitHub, Terrascan can detect security vulnerabilities and compliance violations and mitigate risks before provisioning infrastructure. It is a critical vector for attackers. Best practices. Containerized applications are replicated for high availability, fault tolerance, or scale reasons. Running different applications on the same Kubernetes cluster creates a risk of one compromised application attacking a neighboring application. The last twoOPA and Container Security Operatordon't examine manifests. Download this white paper to understand how moving toward containers can alter your cloud security strategy.Download: Upleveling of Cloud Infrastructure Implications for Cloud Security. The Kubernetes API is what binds the various pieces of a cluster together. Nearly a quarter of respondents use Kube-bench, a tool that audits Kubernetes settings against security checks recommended in the CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes. Based on the needs, we can utilize public repositories or have a private repository as the container registry. The only open source tool in this list that is built for runtime security, Falco is used by 21% of respondents to protect running containerized applications in Kubernetes. What is Kubernetes? | Microsoft Azure Inattention or ignorance can lead to other vulnerabilities. Open source tools are a key part of the Kubernetes security environment, with most companies using open source Kubernetes security software, research by ARMO has revealed. These permissions combine verbs (get, create, delete) with resources (pods, services, nodes) and can be namespace or cluster scoped. These tools also have a rich set of integration points to be used as part of CI/CD pipelines. Kubernetes expects that all API communication in the cluster is encrypted by default with TLS, and the majority of installation methods will allow the necessary certificates to be created and distributed to the cluster components. Although Checkov was originally static, it can operate against a running cluster too. Product Marketing Manager for the Cloud Security portfolio at CrowdStrike. Because each version of Kubernetes requires slightly different benchmarks, the relationship between kube-bench and the CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks is in flux. All your applications and libraries are deployed as containers and run on the nodes, meaning they, plus the application layer, need protection as well. The Kubernetes scheduler will search etcd for pod definitions that do not have a node. Avoid using images with OS package managers or shells because they could contain unknown vulnerabilities. What makes Falco different? The control plane is the brain of Kubernetes clusters, where definitions and the state of all Kubernetes resources are managed and stored. Many of the tools in this article report this problem. Kubernetes Security: Best Practices and Tools - Mend