Kubernetes is a container orchestration framework that is increasingly widely used in enterprise and elsewhere. While the industry is starting to pay some attention to Kubernetes security, there are many attack paths that aren’t well-documented, and are rarely discussed. This lack of information can make your clusters vulnerable.

In this live demonstration-filled talk presented at Black Hat USA 2019, Ian Coldwater and Duffie Cooley walk through the Kubernetes control plane before using sigs.k8s.io/kind to show some of the attack surface exposed by a default configuration of Kubernetes. There will be multiple exploits, including cluster takeovers and host escapes. We’ll show you mitigations, and then show you how to get around those.

The audience will walk away from this talk with a better understanding of Kubernetes’ default attack surface, how it can be exploited, and how to keep their clusters safer.

Almost a year ago, I wrote an article highlighting the transformation of Kubernetes into a universal control plane. The cloud native community has been making steady progress in that direction. The maturity of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) made it possible to bring external resource management into the Kubernetes fold. The Virtual Kubelet project from Microsoft…

An Amazon EKS cluster consists of two primary components:

Amazon EKS Workshop