Kubernetes Community Forums

Hello everyone,

As Kubernetes adoption grows, so does the importance of securing our clusters effectively. I wanted to start a discussion to share and gather best practices for Kubernetes security. This is a broad topic, so let's try to cover areas like:

• Network policies and security
• RBAC and authorization best practices
• Secrets management
• Pod security standards (PSS) and policies (PSP - though deprecated, the principles remain relevant)
• Image scanning and supply chain security
• Runtime security monitoring
• General hardening of the control plane and nodes

What are your go-to strategies? What tools have you found most effective? Are there any common pitfalls to avoid?

Looking forward to a productive discussion!

Great initiative, k8s_admin!

On the topic of RBAC, I strongly advocate for the principle of least privilege. Every service account, user, and group should only have the minimum permissions necessary to perform its function. Regularly auditing RBAC roles and role bindings is crucial. Tools like kube-bench can help with cluster hardening, and rbac-lookup can be handy for analyzing existing permissions.

For Network Policies, start by denying all traffic and then explicitly allow what's needed. This "deny by default" approach significantly reduces the attack surface. Calico and Cilium are popular choices for advanced network policy enforcement.

Regarding Secrets Management, never hardcode secrets. Use Kubernetes Secrets, but also consider integrating with external secrets managers like HashiCorp Vault or cloud provider KMS for enhanced security and rotation capabilities.

Adding to @security_guru's points:

Image Security

We've implemented a CI/CD pipeline that enforces image scanning for vulnerabilities before deployment. Tools like Trivy, Clair, or Aqua Security are integrated into our build process. We also sign our container images to ensure their integrity and prevent tampering.

Pod Security Standards (PSS)

Enforcing PSS at the namespace level is a game-changer. It provides a baseline for security-sensitive settings that pods must adhere to. While PSPs are deprecated, the concepts they enforced (like restricting privileged containers, host mounts, etc.) are still critical and are now handled by PSS.

Runtime Security

For runtime security, we use Falco to detect anomalous behavior within our pods and nodes. It's powerful for identifying potential threats in real-time.