Almost every CIS benchmark has an entire section devoted to IAM best practices and configurations. Many of the IAM risks are covered by the CIS Benchmarks. To use CIS to protect your Kubernetes system, you will need three different CIS Benchmarks: one for Kubernetes, one for the containers you are using in your Kubernetes system, and one for the host operating systems that you are running your master and worker nodes on.Ī Kubernetes service vulnerability detected by Orca (CVE-2021-25741) IAM Risk ĬIS benchmarks are a set of best-practice cybersecurity standards for a range of IT systems that includes Kubernetes and containers. The best way to apply Kubernetes security best practices is to use Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks to do the heavy lifting of hardening your cloud controls. Security Controls Hardening and Best Practices Reduce IAM risk across the entire Kubernetes cluster.Makes sure you are using encryption(CIS can help with this).Make sure you detect and patch/mitigate the vulnerabilities in all of your Kubernetes components.Make sure all components are configured and hardened to security best practices using CIS Kubernetes benchmarks.What does securing them mean? At a minimum, it means the following: master node, worker nodes, and all containers). So now that we have the components we need to secure (i.e. So a simple way of thinking of Kubernetes security is protecting: 1) the host running the master node, 2) the host(s) running worker nodes, and 3) all of the containers running inside of the worker nodes. The worker nodes contain pods that have containers. To simplify this, as seen in the diagram below, you will be running a Kubernetes master node inside a host with one or more hosts running worker nodes. A node can have one or more pods, and a pod can have one or more containers. The master node manages the worker nodes and the pods. A cluster consists of a master node and one or more worker nodes that run containerized applications. When you use Kubernetes you are running what is called a cluster.

A Simple Model for Tackling Kubernetes Security Here at Orca we wanted to highlight a few simple ways CIS can be used to significantly decrease your Kubernetes attack surfaces. The is a silver lining in that CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes can significantly simplify and improve the security of your Kubernetes systems. In fact, according to the 2021 Red Hat State of Kubernetes Security Report, 94% of respondents experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environment in the last 12 months.

Kubernetes is complex, and security is a huge concern. K8s is an open source project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes, aka K8s, is an open source container orchestration platform for the management of containerized applications.

Kubernetes cis benchmark