Preface

The growing complexity and scalability of real-world applications has led to a transition from monolithic architecture to microservices architecture. Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform for deploying microservices. As a developer-friendly platform, Kubernetes enables different configurations to suit different use cases, making it the primary choice among most DevOps engineers. The openness and highly configurable nature of Kubernetes increases its complexity. Increased complexity leads to misconfigurations and security issues, which if exploited, can cause a significant economic impact on an organization. If you are planning to use Kubernetes in your environment, this book is for you.

In this book, you'll learn about how to secure your Kubernetes cluster. We briefly introduce Kubernetes in the first two chapters (we expect you to have a basic understanding of Kubernetes before you begin). We then discuss the default configurations of different Kubernetes components and objects. Default configurations in Kubernetes are often insecure. We discuss different ways to configure your cluster correctly to ensure that it is secure. We pe deep to explore different built-in security mechanisms, such as admission controllers, security contexts, and network policies, that are provided by Kubernetes to help secure your cluster. We also discuss some open source tools that complement the existing toolkits in Kubernetes to improve the security of your cluster. Finally, we look at some real-world examples of attacks and vulnerabilities in Kubernetes clusters and discuss how to harden your cluster to prevent such attacks.

With this book, we hope you will be able to deploy complex applications in your Kubernetes clusters securely. Kubernetes is evolving quickly. With the examples that we provide, we hope you will learn how to reason about the right configurations for your environment.

Who this book is for

This book is for DevOps/DevSecOps professionals who have started adopting Kubernetes as their main deployment/orchestration platform and have a basic understanding of Kubernetes. The book is also for developers who'd like to learn how to secure and harden a Kubernetes cluster.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Kubernetes Architecture, introduces the basics of Kubernetes components and Kubernetes objects.

Chapter 2, Kubernetes Networking, introduces Kubernetes' networking model and pes deep into the communication among microservices.

Chapter 3, Threat Modeling, discusses important assets, threat actors in Kubernetes, and how to conduct threat modeling for applications deployed in Kubernetes.

Chapter 4, Applying the Principle of Least Privilege in Kubernetes, discusses the security control mechanisms in Kubernetes that help in implementing the principle of least privilege in two areas: the least privilege of Kubernetes subjects and the least privilege of Kubernetes workloads.

Chapter 5, Configuring Kubernetes Security Boundaries, discusses the security domains and security boundaries in Kubernetes clusters. Also, it introduces security control mechanisms to strengthen security boundaries.

Chapter 6, Securing Cluster Components, discusses the sensitive configurations in Kubernetes components, such as kube-apiserver, kubelet, and so on. It introduces the use of kube-bench to help identify misconfigurations in Kubernetes clusters.

Chapter 7, Authentication, Authorization, and Admission Control, discusses the authentication and authorization mechanisms in Kubernetes. It also introduces popular admission controllers in Kubernetes.

Chapter 8, Securing Kubernetes Pods, discusses hardening images with CIS Docker Benchmark. It introduces Kubernetes security contexts, Pod Security Policies, and kube-psp-advisor, which helps to generate Pod security policies.

Chapter 9, Image Scanning in DevOps Pipelines, introduces the basic concepts of container images and vulnerabilities. It also introduces the image scanning tool Anchore Engine and how it can be integrated into DevOps pipelines.

Chapter 10, Real-Time Monitoring and Resource Management of a Kubernetes Cluster, introduces built-in mechanisms such as resource request/limits and LimitRanger. It also introduces built-in tools like Kubernetes Dashboard and metrics server, and third-party monitoring tools, such as Prometheus and a data visualization tool called Grafana.

Chapter 11, Defense in Depth, discusses various topics related to defense in depth: Kubernetes auditing, high availability in Kubernetes, secret management, anomaly detection, and forensics.

Chapter 12, Analyzing and Detecting Crypto-Mining Attacks, introduces the basic concepts of cryptocurrency and crypto mining attacks. It then discusses a few ways to detect crypto mining attacks with open source tools such as Prometheus and Falco.

Chapter 13, Learning from Kubernetes CVEs, discusses four well-known Kubernetes CVEs and some corresponding mitigation strategies. It also introduces the open source tool kube-hunter, which helps identify known vulnerabilities in Kubernetes.

To get the most out of this book

Before starting this book, we expect you to have a basic understanding of Kubernetes. While reading this book, we expect you to look at Kubernetes with a security mindset. This book has a lot of examples of hardening and securing Kubernetes workload configurations and components. In addition to trying out the examples, you should also reason about how these examples map to different use cases. We discuss how to use different open source tools in this book. We hope you spend more time understanding the features provided by each tool. Diving deep into different features provided by the tools will help you understand how to configure each tool for different environments:

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying/pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

Log in or register at www.packt.com.
Select the Support tab.
Click on Code Downloads.
Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Kubernetes-Security. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Code in Action

Code in Action videos for this book can be viewed at https://bit.ly/2YZKCJX.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781839216503_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "This attribute is also available in PodSecurityContext, which takes effect at the pod level."

A block of code is set as follows:

{

"filename": "/tmp/minerd2",

"gid": 0,

"linkdest": null,

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

{

"scans": {

"Fortinet": {

"detected": true,

}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ kubectl get pods -n insecure-nginx

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "The screenshot shows the CPU usage of the insecure-nginx pod monitored by Prometheus and Grafana."

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us at customercare@packtpub.com.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at copyright@packt.com with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Reviews

Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you!

For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com.