Securing a Cluster

This document covers topics related to protecting a cluster from accidental or malicious access and provides recommendations on overall security.

Before you begin

  • You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using minikube or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

    To check the version, enter kubectl version.

Controlling access to the Kubernetes API

As Kubernetes is entirely API-driven, controlling and limiting who can access the cluster and what actions they are allowed to perform is the first line of defense.

Use Transport Layer Security (TLS) for all API traffic

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. 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.

API Authentication

Choose an authentication mechanism for the API servers to use that matches the common access patterns when you install a cluster. For instance, small, single-user clusters may wish to use a simple certificate or static Bearer token approach. Larger clusters may wish to integrate an existing OIDC or LDAP server that allow users to be subdivided into groups.

All API clients must be authenticated, even those that are part of the infrastructure like nodes, proxies, the scheduler, and volume plugins. These clients are typically service accounts or use x509 client certificates, and they are created automatically at cluster startup or are setup as part of the cluster installation.

Consult the authentication reference document for more information.

API Authorization

Once authenticated, every API call is also expected to pass an authorization check. Kubernetes ships an integrated Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) component that matches an incoming user or group to a set of permissions bundled into roles. These permissions combine verbs (get, create, delete) with resources (pods, services, nodes) and can be namespace-scoped or cluster-scoped. A set of out-of-the-box roles are provided that offer reasonable default separation of responsibility depending on what actions a client might want to perform. It is recommended that you use the Node and RBAC authorizers together, in combination with the NodeRestriction admission plugin.

As with authentication, simple and broad roles may be appropriate for smaller clusters, but as more users interact with the cluster, it may become necessary to separate teams into separate namespaces with more limited roles.

With authorization, it is important to understand how updates on one object may cause actions in other places. For instance, a user may not be able to create pods directly, but allowing them to create a deployment, which creates pods on their behalf, will let them create those pods indirectly. Likewise, deleting a node from the API will result in the pods scheduled to that node being terminated and recreated on other nodes. The out-of-the box roles represent a balance between flexibility and common use cases, but more limited roles should be carefully reviewed to prevent accidental escalation. You can make roles specific to your use case if the out-of-box ones don’t meet your needs.

Consult the authorization reference section for more information.

Controlling access to the Kubelet

Kubelets expose HTTPS endpoints which grant powerful control over the node and containers. By default Kubelets allow unauthenticated access to this API.

Production clusters should enable Kubelet authentication and authorization.

Consult the Kubelet authentication/authorization reference for more information.

Controlling the capabilities of a workload or user at runtime

Authorization in Kubernetes is intentionally high level, focused on coarse actions on resources. More powerful controls exist as policies to limit by use case how those objects act on the cluster, themselves, and other resources.

Limiting resource usage on a cluster

Resource quota limits the number or capacity of resources granted to a namespace. This is most often used to limit the amount of CPU, memory, or persistent disk a namespace can allocate, but can also control how many pods, services, or volumes exist in each namespace.

Limit ranges restrict the maximum or minimum size of some of the resources above, to prevent users from requesting unreasonably high or low values for commonly reserved resources like memory, or to provide default limits when none are specified.

Controlling what privileges containers run with

A pod definition contains a security context that allows it to request access to run as a specific Linux user on a node (like root), access to run privileged or access the host network, and other controls that would otherwise allow it to run unfettered on a hosting node.

You can configure Pod security admission to enforce use of a particular Pod Security Standard in a namespace, or to detect breaches.

Generally, most application workloads need limited access to host resources so they can successfully run as a root process (uid 0) without access to host information. However, considering the privileges associated with the root user, you should write application containers to run as a non-root user. Similarly, administrators who wish to prevent client applications from escaping their containers should apply the Baseline or Restricted Pod Security Standard.

Preventing containers from loading unwanted kernel modules

The Linux kernel automatically loads kernel modules from disk if needed in certain circumstances, such as when a piece of hardware is attached or a filesystem is mounted. Of particular relevance to Kubernetes, even unprivileged processes can cause certain network-protocol-related kernel modules to be loaded, just by creating a socket of the appropriate type. This may allow an attacker to exploit a security hole in a kernel module that the administrator assumed was not in use.

To prevent specific modules from being automatically loaded, you can uninstall them from the node, or add rules to block them. On most Linux distributions, you can do that by creating a file such as /etc/modprobe.d/kubernetes-blacklist.conf with contents like:

  1. # DCCP is unlikely to be needed, has had multiple serious
  2. # vulnerabilities, and is not well-maintained.
  3. blacklist dccp
  5. # SCTP is not used in most Kubernetes clusters, and has also had
  6. # vulnerabilities in the past.
  7. blacklist sctp

To block module loading more generically, you can use a Linux Security Module (such as SELinux) to completely deny the module_request permission to containers, preventing the kernel from loading modules for containers under any circumstances. (Pods would still be able to use modules that had been loaded manually, or modules that were loaded by the kernel on behalf of some more-privileged process.)

Restricting network access

The network policies for a namespace allows application authors to restrict which pods in other namespaces may access pods and ports within their namespaces. Many of the supported Kubernetes networking providers now respect network policy.

Quota and limit ranges can also be used to control whether users may request node ports or load-balanced services, which on many clusters can control whether those users applications are visible outside of the cluster.

Additional protections may be available that control network rules on a per-plugin or per- environment basis, such as per-node firewalls, physically separating cluster nodes to prevent cross talk, or advanced networking policy.

Restricting cloud metadata API access

Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCE, etc.) often expose metadata services locally to instances. By default these APIs are accessible by pods running on an instance and can contain cloud credentials for that node, or provisioning data such as kubelet credentials. These credentials can be used to escalate within the cluster or to other cloud services under the same account.

When running Kubernetes on a cloud platform, limit permissions given to instance credentials, use network policies to restrict pod access to the metadata API, and avoid using provisioning data to deliver secrets.

Controlling which nodes pods may access

By default, there are no restrictions on which nodes may run a pod. Kubernetes offers a rich set of policies for controlling placement of pods onto nodes and the taint-based pod placement and eviction that are available to end users. For many clusters use of these policies to separate workloads can be a convention that authors adopt or enforce via tooling.

As an administrator, a beta admission plugin PodNodeSelector can be used to force pods within a namespace to default or require a specific node selector, and if end users cannot alter namespaces, this can strongly limit the placement of all of the pods in a specific workload.

Protecting cluster components from compromise

This section describes some common patterns for protecting clusters from compromise.

Restrict access to etcd

Write access to the etcd backend for the API is equivalent to gaining root on the entire cluster, and read access can be used to escalate fairly quickly. Administrators should always use strong credentials from the API servers to their etcd server, such as mutual auth via TLS client certificates, and it is often recommended to isolate the etcd servers behind a firewall that only the API servers may access.

Caution: Allowing other components within the cluster to access the master etcd instance with read or write access to the full keyspace is equivalent to granting cluster-admin access. Using separate etcd instances for non-master components or using etcd ACLs to restrict read and write access to a subset of the keyspace is strongly recommended.

Enable audit logging

The audit logger is a beta feature that records actions taken by the API for later analysis in the event of a compromise. It is recommended to enable audit logging and archive the audit file on a secure server.

Restrict access to alpha or beta features

Alpha and beta Kubernetes features are in active development and may have limitations or bugs that result in security vulnerabilities. Always assess the value an alpha or beta feature may provide against the possible risk to your security posture. When in doubt, disable features you do not use.

Rotate infrastructure credentials frequently

The shorter the lifetime of a secret or credential the harder it is for an attacker to make use of that credential. Set short lifetimes on certificates and automate their rotation. Use an authentication provider that can control how long issued tokens are available and use short lifetimes where possible. If you use service-account tokens in external integrations, plan to rotate those tokens frequently. For example, once the bootstrap phase is complete, a bootstrap token used for setting up nodes should be revoked or its authorization removed.

Review third party integrations before enabling them

Many third party integrations to Kubernetes may alter the security profile of your cluster. When enabling an integration, always review the permissions that an extension requests before granting it access. For example, many security integrations may request access to view all secrets on your cluster which is effectively making that component a cluster admin. When in doubt, restrict the integration to functioning in a single namespace if possible.

Components that create pods may also be unexpectedly powerful if they can do so inside namespaces like the kube-system namespace, because those pods can gain access to service account secrets or run with elevated permissions if those service accounts are granted access to permissive PodSecurityPolicies.

If you use Pod Security admission and allow any component to create Pods within a namespace that permits privileged Pods, those Pods may be able to escape their containers and use this widened access to elevate their privileges.

You should not allow untrusted components to create Pods in any system namespace (those with names that start with kube-) nor in any namespace where that access grant allows the possibility of privilege escalation.

Encrypt secrets at rest

In general, the etcd database will contain any information accessible via the Kubernetes API and may grant an attacker significant visibility into the state of your cluster. Always encrypt your backups using a well reviewed backup and encryption solution, and consider using full disk encryption where possible.

Kubernetes supports optional encryption at rest for information in the Kubernetes API. This lets you ensure that when Kubernetes stores data for objects (for example, Secret or ConfigMap objects), the API server writes an encrypted representation of the object. That encryption means that even someone who has access to etcd backup data is unable to view the content of those objects. In Kubernetes 1.28 you can also encrypt custom resources; encryption-at-rest for extension APIs defined in CustomResourceDefinitions was added to Kubernetes as part of the v1.26 release.

Receiving alerts for security updates and reporting vulnerabilities

Join the kubernetes-announce group for emails about security announcements. See the security reporting page for more on how to report vulnerabilities.

What’s next