Kube Agent Hardening for Fleet-Wide Secure Telemetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-922X.IJERET-V3I3P115Keywords:
Kubernetes Security, Kube Agent Hardening, Secure Telemetry, Zero Trust, Container Security, RBAC, Fleet Management, Observability, Threat Detection, Cloud-Native SecurityAbstract
Kubernetes has become the technological pillar of the cloud and, more specifically, the cloud-native infrastructures, that is, the infrastructures that are implemented by means of cloud services. It has thus facilitated all those organizations that wanted to manage all their containerized workloads through wide and distributed environments. Kube agents are at the core of this ecosystem they are the smallest, lightweight components that collect and send telemetry data, which is necessary data if we want to be able to monitor observability and performance and keep the clusters in compliance. We briefly refer to the problems of non-uniform agent configurations, the dangers of agent communication channels, as well as the issue of operators that have to work really hard just in order to distribute security controls equally throughout all kinds of clusters. For solving those problems, we come up with a plan that includes a combination of zero-trust principles, the procedure of rotating certificates throughout the whole fleet and the utilization of fine-grained policies that are related to roles and, at the same time, are completely integrated with Kubernetes-native constructs. According to our research, securing telemetry is not only about encrypting the data that are being sent but it is also about being able to develop confidence against the situations of the agents not being properly configured, of the insiders who may pose threats and also of the utilization of compounding persistence-type malware, which may leverage agent-level weaknesses.
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