Cloud Native Security

CHAPTER 5Kubernetes Vulnerabilities

As the number of containers that you are running continues to increase over time, it becomes imperative that a container orchestrator of some description is used to manage them. The dynamic nature of orchestrators, such as Red Hat's OpenShift or Docker Swarm, means that their configuration is inherently complex, and they can be difficult to secure correctly. The most popular container orchestrator, Kubernetes, is what this book focuses on and for good reason due to its provenance.

Kubernetes (kubernetes.io) heralds from Google and began life as Borg (research.google/pubs/pub43438). Over the course of the next decade or so Kubernetes became Open Sourced, and its popularity, having run years of containerized workloads for Google's own services in one form or another, gained maturity to the extent that thousands of household names started hosting their online applications with it over subsequent years.

Gaining a deeper insight into how secure your Kubernetes cluster's configuration is can save all sorts of headaches that might otherwise have arisen. There's a clever piece of open source software called kube-hunter (github.com/aquasecurity/kube-hunter), from Aqua Security (www.aquasec.com), which can offer genuinely valuable hardening hints and tips for your cluster. In this chapter, we will first create a Kubernetes cluster for test purposes and then explore what kube-hunter can tell us about it.

Mini Kubernetes

Let's get started by creating ...