Hacking Kubernetes: Threat-Driven Analysis and Defense

Want to run your Kubernetes workloads safely and securely? This practical book provides a threat-based guide to Kubernetes security. Each chapter examines a particular component’s architecture and potential default settings and then reviews existing high-profile attacks and historical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Authors Andrew Martin and Michael Hausenblas share best-practice configuration to help you harden clusters from possible angles of attack.

This book begins with a vanilla Kubernetes installation with built-in defaults. You’ll examine an abstract threat model of a distributed system running arbitrary workloads, and then progress to a detailed assessment of each component of a secure Kubernetes system.

• Understand where your Kubernetes system is vulnerable with threat modelling techniques
• Focus on pods, from configurations to attacks and defenses
• Secure your cluster and workload traffic
• Define and enforce policy with RBAC, OPA, and Kyverno
• Dive deep into sandboxing and isolation techniques
• Learn how to detect and mitigate supply chain attacks
• Explore filesystems, volumes, and sensitive information at rest
• Discover what can go wrong when running multitenant workloads in a cluster
• Learn what you can do if someone breaks in despite you having controls in place

Andrew Martin is CEO of ControlPlane.

Michael Hausenblas is Product Developer Advocate Amazon Web Service.