Kubernetes Security Assessment

Businesses have raced to adopt Kubernetes, but often introduce risk through poor understanding.

This comprehensive assessment ensures that Kubernetes environments are not only configured for optimal performance and scalability, but are also hardened against potential security threats, thereby supporting secure container orchestration for cloud-native applications.

The assessment typically includes:

Security Configuration and Policy Review:

• Evaluating Kubernetes configurations and policies to protect against unauthorized access and threats.
• Assessing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policies to ensure least privilege access.
• Reviewing network policies and segmentation to restrict traffic between pods and external access.
• Inspecting Pod Security Policies (PSPs) or their modern equivalents to enforce security best practices in pod creation and operation.

Data Security:

• Assessing encryption of data at rest within persistent volumes and secrets management.
• Evaluating configurations for encrypting data in transit between components.

Network Security:

• Reviewing the implementation of network policies for pod-to-pod communication and ingress/egress controls.
• Assessing the use of service meshes for secure service-to-service communication.
• Evaluating the configuration of Kubernetes ingress controllers for secure application exposure.

Cluster Management Security (if self-managed):

• Inspecting the security of the Kubernetes API server and etcd database, including authentication, authorization, and encryption settings.
• Reviewing the security configurations of Kubernetes control plane components.
• Evaluating the integration and use of Kubernetes security features like Admission Controllers for enhanced security vetting of workloads.

Vulnerability Management and Patching:

• Inspecting container images for vulnerabilities and ensuring an automated scanning process.
• Assessing the process for updating Kubernetes components and container images to address vulnerabilities.

Compliance and Best Practices:

• Checking adherence to Kubernetes security best practices and benchmarks (e.g., CIS Kubernetes Benchmark).
• Reviewing the cluster setup and configurations for compliance with relevant standards (e.g., NIST, PCI-DSS, HIPAA where applicable).

Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting:

• Evaluating the implementation of logging and monitoring to cover all critical components of the Kubernetes cluster.
• Reviewing alerting mechanisms for security incidents and performance issues.

Disaster Recovery and Data Backup:

• Assessing strategies for disaster recovery, including backup and restore procedures for Kubernetes resources and persistent data.

Identity and Access Management:

• Reviewing the management of identities and access controls, including integration with external identity providers.
• Evaluating the use and management of service accounts within the cluster.

Security Testing and Audit:

• Conducting security penetration testing on the Kubernetes environment to identify potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
• Reviewing audit logs and trails for suspicious activities or non-compliance with security policies.
• Reviewing auxiliary services, such as DNS and certificate operators.

Infrastructure as Code Security:

• Assessing the security of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices used for provisioning and managing Kubernetes resources.
• Reviewing the use of version control and automated deployment pipelines for Kubernetes configurations and secrets.
• Reviewing the CI/CD tooling, such as ArgoCD or Jenkins.