Threat-driven Analysis and Defense for Securing Kubernetes

Key topics on Access Control Podcast: Episode 8 - Securing Kubernetes

• Evaluating a Kubernetes cluster can occur on several levels. Standard
  isolation questions include examining how traffic gets into a
  cluster, how people can access the nodes, and whether the API server
  is public or private.
• The three common sources of compromise for Kubernetes clusters are supply chain risks, threat actors, and insider threats.
• Most hosted Kubernetes systems, especially cloud provider systems, come with a hardened node image.
• When companies get into feature delivery tunnel vision, security takes a back seat, and at some point, they might be left running an outdated node version.
• Without smooth continuous delivery pipelines, the responsibility of managing your own infrastructure can be too much for an organization.
• One preferred way of updating a Kubernetes cluster is to do a blue-green deployment, whereby there are two clusters behind the load balancer.
• Misconfiguration is a main cause of security incidents, and preventing misconfigurations is about testing.
• A Kubernetes namespace is not a security boundary in itself because there are things that are not namespaced, so there is no way to accurately correlate security criteria to the namespace.