04/22/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/22/2025 16:35
The flexibility and configurability of Kubernetes is also what makes it susceptible to security misconfigurations that can lead to devastating exploits. Discover how security misconfigurations affect the different components of your Kubernetes infrastructure and how you can mitigate against them.
Picture this: A notification appears on a monitoring dashboard indicating the production Kubernetes cluster has been compromised. An attacker has gained access through security misconfigurations in an API server, escalated privileges, and deployed cryptocurrency mining pods that consume massive resources. The DevOps team spends the day containing the damage and now faces tough questions from leadership about how this happened.
Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common. According to Red Hat's State of Kubernetes Security Report 2024, a staggering 89% of organizations experienced at least one security incident related to Kubernetes, with 40% of respondents detecting security issues specifically in their container or Kubernetes configurations.
Kubernetes has revolutionized how we deploy, scale and manage containerized applications. Its remarkable flexibility and scalability have made it the de facto standard for container orchestration. However, this power comes with a price: complexity that can lead to security blind spots.
When we talk about security misconfigurations in Kubernetes, we're referring to settings that are either incorrectly configured or left at their insecure defaults. These seemingly minor oversights can create significant security gaps, making your cluster an easy target for potential attacks.
Think of Kubernetes security misconfigurations as unlocked doors in your otherwise well-secured building. You might have state-of-the-art surveillance systems and guards at the main entrance, but if a side door is left unlocked, all the security becomes meaningless.
To truly understand how security misconfigurations manifest, we need to examine the key components of Kubernetes and see how each one can be a potential point of vulnerability. Like pieces of a puzzle, these components must fit together securely to create a properly protected cluster.
Kubernetes architecture and how security misconfigurations can affect each component.At the heart of every Kubernetes cluster lies the control plane, which includes several critical components. Here's what they are and what's at stake if a misconfiguration exposes a vulnerability.
The etcd Database is the brain of your cluster, storing all configuration data that the API server uses to verify and maintain the cluster state.
These components are the conductors of your Kubernetes cluster, ensuring that your applications run smoothly and efficiently. The scheduler assigns pods to nodes whereas the controller maintains the desired state of the cluster.
While securing the control plane is crucial, worker nodes are often the entry point for attacks.
This agent runs on each node and ensures containers are running in a pod.
The container runtime is the software responsible for running your containers (like Docker or contained).
In post-incident analyses, teams often discover multiple containers running as root without any need for those privileges-a common oversight that creates significant risk.
Network layers are the fabric connecting all components of your Kubernetes cluster.
It is quite common for teams to often discover network policies that are overly permissive or completely absent-another example of a common oversight that can lead to exploitation.
In the second part of this series, we'll map Kubernetes security misconfigurations to specific attack techniques using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. We'll explore real-world Kubernetes security incidents, including the recent IngressNightmare vulnerability, demonstrate typical attack paths that malicious actors follow, and outline comprehensive security approaches to protect your clusters from these threats.
To learn more about the attack paths threat actors use to exploit these security misconfigurations, see part 2 of this Kubernetes security essentials series, Kubernetes misconfiguration attack paths and mitigation strategies.