Ask Sendai

A recently disclosed vulnerability in Kubernetes dashboard (CVE-2018-18264) exposes secrets to unauthenticated users. In this blog post we’ll explore some key takeaways regarding monitoring privilege escalation on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes dashboard is a web based user interface that allows users to manage applications and resources within the cluster. This service has a login functionality starting from Kubernetes 1.7.0. Since then, users are able to authenticate with a kubeconfig file or an access token.

Our security culture is one of the things that sets AWS apart. Security is job zero — it is the foundation for all AWS employees and impacts the work we do every day, across the company. And that’s reflected in our services, which undergo exacting internal and external security reviews before being released. From there, we have historically waited for customer demand to begin the complex process of third-party assessment and validating services under specific compliance programs.

Tackling security compliance is a long and challenging process for agencies, systems integrators, and vendors trying to launch new information systems in the federal government. Each new information system must go through the Risk Management Framework (RMF) created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to obtain authority to operate (ATO). This process is often long and tedious and can last for over a year.

Learn from hands-on labs to build proficiency with Vault 1.0, auto-unseal, Kubernetes, and other secrets management features. Source: hashicorp.com

As a first step toward encrypting the last portion of internet traffic that has historically been cleartext, we have partnered with Cloudflare DNS on a pilot project. This pilot takes advantage of the benefits of Transport Layer Security (TLS) — a widely adopted and proven mechanism for providing authentication and confidentiality between two parties over an insecure channel — in conjunction with DNS. This solution, DNS over TLS (DoT), would encrypt and authenticate the remaining portion of web traffic.

Kiam: Iterating for Security and ReliabilityPaul InglesBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingMay 1Kiam bridges Kubernetes’ Pods with Amazon’s Identity and Access Management (IAM). It makes it easy to assign short-lived AWS security credentials to your application. We created Kiam in 2017 to quickly address correctness issues we had running kube2iam in our production clusters. We’ve made a number of changes to it’s original design to make it more secure, reliable and easier to operate. This article covers a little of the story that led to us creating Kiam and more about what makes it novel.

At Ibotta, we chose kube2iam to assign AWS IAM Roles to containers running in our Kubernetes cluster. Lately, we’ve run into some issues with it—specifically when running a job that scores all of our service repos. This spins up a number of pods in parallel and has often failed to correctly access roles. After further investigation, the future of the project seems to be uncertain and there are other issues logged around race conditions, etc.

Earlier this year at KubeCon in Copenhagen, the message from the community was resoundingly clear: “this year, it’s about security”. If Kubernetes was to move into the enterprise, there were real security challenges that needed to be addressed. Six months later, at this week’s KubeCon in Seattle, we’re happy to report that the community has largely answered that call. In general, Kubernetes has made huge security strides this year, and giant strides on Google Cloud.

Container security orchestration allows to define within your security policy how you are going to respond to your different container security incidents. These responses can be automated in what is called security playbooks. This way, you can define and orchestrate multiple workflows involving different software both for sourcing and responding. This is how Falco and Splunk Phantom can be integrated together to do this. Phantom is a security orchestration platform, part of Splunk product portfolio.

Kubernetes has finally hit the worst milestone: their first major security flaw. This vulnerability allows any user to escalate their administrative privileges and attack any container running on the same pod. Even worse, there’s no simple way to tell if you’ve been affected. Grim news from Red Hat – Kubernetes has identified its first major security flaw. This vulnerability affecting Kubernetes 1.10 and higher was publicly disclosed on GitHub last week.