Kubernetes Security Cheat Sheet

Kubernetes Security Cheat Sheet

Overview

This cheat sheet provides a starting point for securing a Kubernetes cluster. It is divided into the following categories:

• Receive Alerts for Kubernetes Updates
• INTRODUCTION: What is Kubernetes?
• Securing Kubernetes hosts
• Securing Kubernetes components
• Using the Kubernetes dashboard
• Kubernetes Security Best Practices: Build Phase
• Kubernetes Security Best Practices: Deploy Phase
• Kubernetes Security Best Practices: Runtime Phase

For more information about Kubernetes, refer to the Appendix.

Receive Alerts for Security Updates and Reporting Vulnerabilities

Join the kubernetes-announce group (https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/security/) for emails about security announcements. See the security reporting page (https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/security) for more on how to report vulnerabilities.

INTRODUCTION: What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The open source project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

When you deploy Kubernetes, you get a cluster. A Kubernetes cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes that run containerized applications. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster.

Control Plane Components

The control plane's components make global decisions about the cluster, as well as detecting and responding to cluster events. It consists of components such as kube-apiserver, etcd, kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager and cloud-controller-manager.

Component: kube-apiserver
Description: Exposes the Kubernetes API. The API server is the front end for the Kubernetes control plane.

Component: etcd
Description: A consistent and highly-available key-value store used as Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster data.

Component: kube-scheduler
Description: Watches for newly created Pods with no assigned node, and selects a node for them to run on.

Component: kube-controller-manager
Description: Runs controller processes. Logically, each controller is a separate process, but to reduce complexity, they are all compiled into a single binary and run in a single process.

Component: cloud-controller-manager
Description: The cloud controller manager lets you link your cluster into your cloud provider's API, and separates out the components that interact with that cloud platform from components that just interact with your cluster.

Node Components

Node components run on every node, maintaining running pods and providing the Kubernetes runtime environment. It consists of components such as kubelet, kube-proxy and container runtime.

Component: kubelet
Description: An agent that runs on each node in the cluster. It makes sure that containers are running in a Pod.

Component: kube-proxy
Description: A network proxy that runs on each node in your cluster, implementing part of the Kubernetes Service concept.

Container: runtime
Description: The container runtime is the software that is responsible for running containers |

SECTION 1: Securing Kubernetes Hosts

Kubernetes can be deployed in different ways: on bare metal, on-premise, and in the public cloud (a custom Kubernetes build on virtual machines OR use a managed service). Since Kubernetes is designed to be highly portable, customers can easily and migrate their workloads and switch between multiple installations.

Because Kubernetes can be designed to fit a large variety of scenarios, this flexibility is a weakness when it comes to securing Kubernetes clusters. The engineers responsible for deploying the Kubernetes platform must know about all the potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities for their clusters.

To harden the underlying hosts for Kubernetes clusters, we recommend that you install the latest version of the operating systems, harden the operating systems, implement necessary patch management and configuration management systems, implement essential firewall rules and undertake specific datacenter-based security measures.

Updating Kubernetes

Since no one can track all potential attack vectors for your Kubernetes cluster, the first and best defense is to always run the latest stable version of Kubernetes.

In case vulnerabilities are found in running containers, it is recommended to always update the source image and redeploy the containers. Try to avoid direct updates to the running containers as this can break the image-container relationship.

Example: apt-update

Upgrading containers is extremely easy with the Kubernetes rolling updates feature - this allows gradually updating a running application by upgrading its images to the latest version.

Release schedule for Kubernetes

The Kubernetes project maintains release branches for the most recent three minor releases and it backports the applicable fixes, including security fixes, to those three release branches, depending on severity and feasibility. Patch releases are cut from those branches at a regular cadence, plus additional urgent releases, when required. Hence it is always recommended to upgrade the Kubernetes cluster to the latest available stable version. It is recommended to refer to the version skew policy for further details https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/version-skew-policy/.

There are several techniques such as rolling updates, and node pool migrations that allow you to complete an update with minimal disruption and downtime.

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SECTION 2: Securing Kubernetes Components

This section discusses how to secure Kubernetes components. It covers the following topics:

• Securing the Kubernetes Dashboard
• Restricting access to etcd (Important)
• Controlling network access to sensitive ports
• Controlling access to the Kubernetes API
• Implementing role-based access control in Kubernetes
• Limiting access to Kubelets

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Securing the Kubernetes Dashboard

The Kubernetes dashboard is a webapp for managing your cluster. It is not a part of the Kubernetes cluster itself, it has to be installed by the owners of the cluster. Thus, there are a lot of tutorials on how to do this. Unfortunately, most of them create a service account with very high privileges. This caused Tesla and some others to be hacked via such a poorly configured K8s dashboard. (Reference: Tesla cloud resources are hacked to run cryptocurrency-mining malware - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/tesla-cloud-resources-are-hacked-to-run-cryptocurrency-mining-malware/)

To prevent attacks via the dashboard, you should follow some tips:

• Do not expose the dashboard without additional authentication to the public. There is no need to access such a powerful tool from outside your LAN
• Turn on Role-Based Access Control (see below), so you can limit the service account the dashboard uses
• Do not grant the service account of the dashboard high privileges
• Grant permissions per user, so each user only can see what they are supposed to see
• If you are using network policies, you can block requests to the dashboard even from internal pods (this will not affect the proxy tunnel via kubectl proxy)
• Before version 1.8, the dashboard had a service account with full privileges, so check that there is no role binding for cluster-admin left.
• Deploy the dashboard with an authenticating reverse proxy, with multi-factor authentication enabled. This can be done with either embedded OIDC id_tokens or using Kubernetes Impersonation. This allows you to use the dashboard with the user's credentials instead of using a privileged ServiceAccount. This method can be used on both on-prem and managed cloud clusters.

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Restricting Access To etcd (IMPORTANT)

etcd is a critical Kubernetes component which stores information on states and secrets, and it should be protected differently from the rest of your cluster. Write access to the API server's etcd is equivalent to gaining root on the entire cluster, and even read access can be used to escalate privileges fairly easily.

The Kubernetes scheduler will search etcd for pod definitions that do not have a node. It then sends the pods it finds to an available kubelet for scheduling. Validation for submitted pods is performed by the API server before it writes them to etcd, so malicious users writing directly to etcd can bypass many security mechanisms - e.g. PodSecurityPolicies.

Administrators should always use strong credentials from the API servers to their etcd server, such as mutual auth via TLS client certificates, and it is often recommended to isolate the etcd servers behind a firewall that only the API servers may access.

Limiting access to the primary etcd instance

Allowing other components within the cluster to access the primary etcd instance with read or write access to the full keyspace is equivalent to granting cluster-admin access. Using separate etcd instances for other components or using etcd ACLs to restrict read and write access to a subset of the keyspace is strongly recommended.

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Controlling Network Access to Sensitive Ports

It is highly recommended to configure authentication and authorization on the cluster and cluster nodes. Since Kubernetes clusters usually listen on a range of well-defined and distinctive ports, it is easier for attackers to identify the clusters and attack them.

An overview of the default ports used in Kubernetes is provided below. Make sure that your network blocks access to ports, and you should seriously consider limiting access to the Kubernetes API server to trusted networks.

Control plane node(s):

Worker nodes:

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Controlling Access To The Kubernetes API

The first line of defense of Kubernetes against attackers is limiting and securing access to API requests, because those requests are used to control the Kubernetes platform. For more information, refer to the documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/controlling-access/.

This part contains the following topics:

• How Kubernetes handles API authorization
• External API Authentication for Kubernetes (recommended)
• Kubernetes Built-In API Authentication (not recommended)
• Implementing role-based access in Kubernetes
• Limiting access to Kubelets

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How Kubernetes handles API authorization

In Kubernetes, you must be authenticated (logged in) before your request can be authorized (granted permission to access), and Kubernetes expects attributes that are common to REST API requests. This means that existing organization-wide or cloud-provider-wide access control systems which may handle other APIs work with Kubernetes authorization.

When Kubernetes authorizes API requests using the API server, permissions are denied by default. It evaluates all of the request attributes against all policies and allows or denies the request. All parts of an API request must be allowed by some policy in order to proceed.

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External API Authentication for Kubernetes (RECOMMENDED)

Due to the weakness of Kubernetes' internal mechanisms for authenticating APIs, we strongly recommended that larger or production clusters use one of the external API authentication methods.

• OpenID Connect (OIDC) lets you externalize authentication, use short lived tokens, and leverage centralized groups for authorization.
• Managed Kubernetes distributions such as GKE, EKS and AKS support authentication using credentials from their respective IAM providers.
• Kubernetes Impersonation can be used with both managed cloud clusters and on-prem clusters to externalize authentication without having to have access to the API server configuration parameters.

In addition to choosing the appropriate authentication system, API access should be considered privileged and use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all user access.

For more information, consult Kubernetes authentication reference documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/authentication.

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Options for Kubernetes Built-In API Authentication (NOT RECOMMENDED)

Kubernetes provides a number of internal mechanisms for API server authentication but these are usually only suitable for non-production or small clusters. We will briefly discuss each internal mechanism and explain why you should not use them.

• Static Token File: Authentication makes use of clear text tokens stored in a CSV file on API server node(s). WARNING: You cannot modify credentials in this file until the API server is restarted.

• X509 Client Certs are available but are unsuitable for production use, since Kubernetes does not support certificate revocation. As a result, these user credentials cannot be modified or revoked without rotating the root certificate authority key and re-issuing all cluster certificates.

• Service Accounts Tokens are also available for authentication. Their primary intended use is to allow workloads running in the cluster to authenticate to the API server, however they can also be used for user authentication.

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Implementing Role-Based Access Control in Kubernetes

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method for regulating access to computer or network resources based on the roles of individual users within your organization. Fortunately, Kubernetes comes with an integrated Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) component with default roles that allow you to define user responsibilities depending on what actions a client might want to perform. You should use the Node and RBAC authorizers together in combination with the NodeRestriction admission plugin.

The RBAC component matches an incoming user or group to a set of permissions linked to roles. These permissions combine verbs (get, create, delete) with resources (pods, services, nodes) and can be namespace or cluster scoped. RBAC authorization uses the rbac.authorization.k8s.io API group to drive authorization decisions, allowing you to dynamically configure policies through the Kubernetes API.

To enable RBAC, start the API server with the --authorization-mode flag set to a comma-separated list that includes RBAC; for example:

kube-apiserver --authorization-mode=Example,RBAC --other-options --more-options

For detailed examples of utilizing RBAC, refer to Kubernetes documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/rbac

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Limiting access to the Kubelets

Kubelets expose HTTPS endpoints which grant powerful control over the node and containers. By default Kubelets allow unauthenticated access to this API. Production clusters should enable Kubelet authentication and authorization.

For more information, refer to Kubelet authentication/authorization documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/kubelet-authn-authz/

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SECTION 3: Kubernetes Security Best Practices: Build Phase

During the build phase, you should secure your Kubernetes container images by building secure images and scanning those images for any known vulnerabilities.

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What is a container image?

A container image (CI) is an immutable, lightweight, standalone package that contains everything required to run an application — the application code, runtime, system libraries, configuration and system tools. Images are built as layered, read-only artifacts that are portable between hosts but share the host machine’s operating system kernel. See Docker: What is a container? (https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container).

Your CIs must be built on a approved and secure base image. This base image must be scanned and monitored at regular intervals to ensure that all CIs are based on a secure and authentic image. Implement strong governance policies that determine how images are built and stored in trusted image registries.

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Ensure that CIs are up to date

Ensure your images (and any third-party tools you include) are up-to-date and use the latest versions of their components.

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Only use authorized images in Your environment

Downloading and running CIs from unknown sources is very dangerous. Make sure that only images adhering to the organization’s policy are allowed to run, or else the organization is open to risk of running vulnerable or even malicious containers.

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Use A CI Pipeline To Control and Identify Vulnerabilities

The Kubernetes container registry serves as a central repository of all container images in the system. Depending on your needs, you can utilize a public repository or have a private repository as the container registry. We recommend that you store your approved images in a private registry and only push approved images to these registries, which automatically reduces the number of potential images that enter your pipeline down to a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of publicly available images.

Also, we strongly recommend that you add a CI pipeline that integrates security assessment (like vulnerability scanning) into the build process. This pipeline should vet all code that is approved for production and is used to build the images. After an image is built, it should be scanned for security vulnerabilities. Only if no issues are found, then the image would be pushed to a private registry then deployed to production. If the security assessment mechanism fails any code, it should create a failure in the pipeline, which will help you find images with security problems and prevent them from entering the image registry.

Many source code repositories provide scanning capabilities (e.g. Github, GitLab), and many CI tools offer integration with open source vulnerability scanners such as Trivy or Grype.

Projects are developing image authorization plugins for Kubernetes that prevent unauthorized images from shipping. For more information, refer to the PR https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/27129.

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Minimize Features in All CIs

As a best practice, Google and other tech giants have strictly limiting the code in their runtime container for years. This approach improves the signal-to-noise of scanners (e.g. CVE) and reduces the burden of establishing provenance to just what you need.

Consider using minimal CIs such as distroless images (see below). If this is not possible, do not include OS package managers or shells in CIs because they may have unknown vulnerabilities. If you absolutely must include any OS packages, remove the package manager at a later step in the generation process.

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Use distroless or empty images when possible

Distroless images sharply reduce the attack surface because they do not include shells and contain fewer packages than other images. For more information on distroless images, refer to https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless.

An empty image, ideal for statically compiled languages like Go, because the image is empty - the attack surface it is truly minimal - only your code!

For more information, refer to https://hub.docker.com/_/scratch

SECTION 4: Kubernetes Security Best Practices: Deploy Phase

Once a Kubernetes infrastructure is in place, you must configure it securely before any workloads are deployed. And as you configure your infrastructure, ensure that you have visibility into what CIs are being deployed and how they are being deployed or else you will not be able to identify and respond to security policy violations. Before deployment, your system should know and be able to tell you:

• What is being deployed - including information about the image being used, such as components or vulnerabilities, and the pods that will be deployed.
• Where it is going to be deployed - which clusters, namespaces, and nodes.
• How it is deployed - whether it runs privileged, what other deployments it can communicate with, the pod security context that is applied, if any.
• What it can access - including secrets, volumes, and other infrastructure components such as the host or orchestrator API.
• Is it compliant? - whether it complies with your policies and security requirements.

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Code that uses namespaces to isolate Kubernetes resources

Namespaces give you the ability to create logical partitions, enforce separation of your resources and limit the scope of user permissions.

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Setting the namespace for a request

To set the namespace for a current request, use the --namespace flag. Refer to the following examples:

kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>
kubectl get pods --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>

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Setting the namespace preference

You can permanently save the namespace for all subsequent kubectl commands in that context with:

kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>

Then validate it with the following command:

kubectl config view --minify | grep namespace:

Learn more about namespaces at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/namespaces

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Use the ImagePolicyWebhook to govern image provenance

We strongly recommend that you use the admission controller ImagePolicyWebhook to prevent unapproved images from being used, reject pods that use unapproved images, and refuse CIs that meet the following criteria:

• Images that haven’t been scanned recently
• Images that use a base image that’s not explicitly allowed
• Images from insecure registries

Learn more about webhook at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/admission-controllers/#imagepolicywebhook

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Implement continuous security vulnerability scanning

Since new vulnerabilities are always being discovered, you may not always know if your containers may have recently-disclosed vulnerabilities (CVEs) or outdated packages. To maintain a strong security posture, do regular production scanning of first-party containers (applications you have built and previously scanned) as well as third-party containers (which are sourced from trusted repository and vendors).

Open Source projects such as ThreatMapper can assist in identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities.

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Apply security context to your pods and containers

The security context is a property that is defined in the deployment yaml and controls the security parameters for all pod/container/volumes, and it should be applied throughout your infrastructure. When the security context property is properly implemented everywhere, it can eliminate entire classes of attacks that rely on privileged access. For example, any attack that depends on installing software or writing to the file system will be stopped if you specify read-only root file systems in the security context.

When you are configuring the security context for your pods, only grant the privileges that are needed for the resources to function in your containers and volumes. Some of the important parameters in the security context property are:

Security Context Settings:

1. SecurityContext->runAsNonRoot
   Description: Indicates that containers should run as non-root user.

2. SecurityContext->Capabilities
   Description: Controls the Linux capabilities assigned to the container.

3. SecurityContext->readOnlyRootFilesystem
   Description: Controls whether a container will be able to write into the root filesystem.

4. PodSecurityContext->runAsNonRoot
   Description: Prevents running a container with 'root' user as part of the pod |

Security context example: A pod definition that includes security context parameters

apiVersion: v1

kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: hello-world
spec:
  containers:
  # specification of the pod’s containers
  # ...
  # ...
  # Security Context
  securityContext:
    readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
    runAsNonRoot: true

For more information on security context for Pods, refer to the documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context

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Continuously assess the privileges used by containers

We strongly recommend that all your containers should adhere to the principle of least privilege, since your security risk is heavily influenced by the capabilities, role bindings, and privileges given to containers. Each container should only have the minimum privileges and capabilities that allows it to perform its intended function.

Utilize Pod Security Standards and the Built-in Pod Security Admission Controller to enforce container privilege levels

Pod Security Standards combined with the Pod Security Admission Controller allow cluster administrators to enforce requirements on a pods securityContext fields. Three Pod Security Standard profiles exist:

• Privileged: Unrestricted, allows for known privilege escalations. Intended for use with system and infrastructure level workloads that require privilege to operate properly. All securityContext settings are permitted
• Baseline: Minimally restrictive policy designed for common containerized workloads while preventing known privilege escalations. Targeted at developers and operators of non-critical applications. The most dangerous securityContext settings, such as securityContext.privileged, hostPID, hostPath, hostIPC, are not permitted.
• Restricted: The most restrictive policy, designed to enforce current Pod hardening practices at the expense of some compatibility. Intended for security critical workloads or untrusted users. Restricted includes all of the enforcements from the baseline policy, in addition to much more restrictive requirements, such as requiring the dropping of all capabilities, enforcing runAsNotRoot, and more.

Each of the profiles have defined settings baselines that can be found in more detail here.

The Pod Security Admission Controller allows you to enforce, audit, or warn upon the violation of a defined policy. audit and warn modes can be utilized to determine if a particular Pod Security Standard would normally prevent the deployment of a pod when set to enforce mode.

Below is an example of a namespace that would only allow Pods to be deployed that conform to the restricted Pod Security Standard:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: policy-test
  labels:    
    pod-security.kubernetes.io/enforce: restricted
    pod-security.kubernetes.io/audit: restricted
    pod-security.kubernetes.io/warn: restricted

Cluster administrators should properly organize and and enforce policy on cluster namespaces, only permitting the privileged policy on namespaces where it is absolutely required, such as for critical cluster services that require access to the underlying host. Namespaces should be set to the lowest Pod Security Policy that can be enforced and supports their risk level.

If more granular policy enforcement is required beyond the three profiles (Privileged, Baseline, Restricted), Third party admission controllers like OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno, or built-in Validating Admission Policy can be utilized.

Use Pod security policies to control the security-related attributes of pods, which includes container privilege levels

Warning
Kubernetes deprecated Pod Security Policies in favor of Pod Security Standards and the Pod Security Admission Controller, and was removed from Kubernetes in v1.25. Consider using Pod Security Standards and the Pod Security Admission Controller instead.

All security policies should include the following conditions:

• Application processes do not run as root.
• Privilege escalation is not allowed.
• The root filesystem is read-only.
• The default (masked) /proc filesystem mount is used.
• The host network or process space should NOT be used - using hostNetwork: true will cause NetworkPolicies to be ignored since the Pod will use its host network.
• Unused and unnecessary Linux capabilities are eliminated.
• Use SELinux options for more fine-grained process controls.
• Give each application its own Kubernetes Service Account.
• If a container does not need to access the Kubernetes API, do not let it mount the service account credentials.

For more information on Pod security policies, refer to the documentation at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/policy/pod-security-policy/.

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Providing extra security with a service mesh

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that can handle communications between services in applications quickly, securely and reliably, which can help reduce the complexity of managing microservices and deployments. They provide a uniform way to secure, connect and monitor microservices. and a service mesh is great at resolving operational challenges and issues when running those containers and microservices.

Advantages of a service mesh

A service mesh provides the following advantages:

1. Observability

It generates tracing and telemetry metrics, which make it easy to understand your system and quickly root cause any problems.

2. Specialized security features

It provides security features which quickly identify any compromising traffic that enters your cluster and can secure the services inside your network if they are properly implemented. It can also help you manage security through mTLS, ingress and egress control, and more.

3. Ability to secure microservices with mTLS

Since securing microservices is hard, there are many tools that address microservices security. However, the service mesh is the most elegant solution for addressing encryption of on-the-wire traffic within the network.

It provides defense with mutual TLS (mTLS) encryption of the traffic between your services, and the mesh can automatically encrypt and decrypt requests and responses, which removes that burden from application developers. The mesh can also improve performance by prioritizing the reuse of existing, persistent connections, which reduces the need for the computationally expensive creation of new ones. With service mesh, you can secure traffic over the wire and also make strong identity-based authentication and authorizations for each microservice.

We see that a service mesh has a lot of value of enterprise companies, because a mesh allows you to see whether mTLS is enabled and working between each of your services. Also, you can get immediate alerts if the security status changes.

4. Ingress & egress control

It allows you to monitor and address compromising traffic as it passes through the mesh. For example, if Istio integrates with Kubernetes as an ingress controller, it can take care of load balancing for ingress. This allows defenders to add a level of security at the perimeter with ingress rules, while egress control allows you to see and manage external services and control how your services interact with traffic.

5. Operational Control

It can help security and platform teams set the right macro controls to enforce access controls, while allowing developers to make customizations they need to move quickly within these guardrails.

6. Ability to manage RBAC

A service mesh can help defenders implement a strong Role Based Access Control (RBAC) system, which is arguably one of the most critical requirements in large engineering organizations. Even a secure system can be easily circumvented by over-privileged users or employees, and an RBAC system can:

• Restrict privileged users to least privileges necessary to perform job responsibilities
• Ensure that access to systems are set to “deny all” by default
• Help developers make sure that proper documentation detailing roles and responsibilities are in place, which is one of the most critical security concerns in the enterprise.

Disadvantages of the security mesh

Though a service mesh has many advantages, they also bring in a unique set of challenges and a few of them are listed below:

• Adds A New Layer of Complexity

When proxies, sidecars and other components are introduced an already sophisticated environment, it dramatically increases the complexity of development and operations.

• Additional Expertise Is Required

If a mesh like Istio is added on top of an orchestrator such as Kubernetes, operators need to become experts in both technologies.

• Infrastructure Can Be Slowed

Because a service mesh is an invasive and intricate technology, it can significantly slow down an architecture.

• Requires Adoption of Yet Another Platform

Since service meshes are invasive, they force developers and operators to adapt to a highly opinionated platform and conform to its rules.

Implementing centralized policy management

There are numerous projects which are able to provide centralized policy management for a Kubernetes cluster, including the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project, Kyverno, or the Validating Admission Policy (a built-in feature released to general availability in 1.30). In order to provide an example with some depth, we will focus on OPA in this cheat sheet.

OPA was started in 2016 to unify policy enforcement across different technologies and systems, and it can be used to enforce policies on a platform like Kubernetes. Currently, OPA is part of CNCF as an incubating project. It can create a unified method of enforcing security policy in the stack. While developers can impose fine-grained control over the cluster with RBAC and Pod security policies, these technologies only apply to the cluster but not outside the cluster.

Since OPA is a general-purpose, domain-agnostic policy enforcement tool that is not based on any other project, the policy queries and decisions do not follow a specific format. Thus it can be integrated with APIs, the Linux SSH daemon, an object store like Ceph, and you can use any valid JSON data as request attributes as long as it provides the required data. OPA allows you to choose what is input and what is output--for example, you can opt to have OPA return a True or False JSON object, a number, a string, or even a complex data object.

Most common use cases of OPA

OPA for application authorization

OPA can provide developers with an already-developed authorization technology so the team doesn’t have to develop one from scratch. It uses a declarative policy language purpose built for writing and enforcing rules such as, “Alice can write to this repository,” or “Bob can update this account.” This technology provides a rich suite of tools that can allow developers to integrate policies into their applications and allow end users to also create policy for their tenants.

If you already have a homegrown application authorization solution, you may not want to swap in OPA. But if you want to improve developer efficiency by moving to a solution that scales with microservices and allows you to decompose monolithic apps, you’re going to need a distributed authorization system and OPA (or one of the related competitors) could be the answer.

OPA for Kubernetes admission control

Since Kubernetes gives developers tremendous control over the traditional silos of "compute, networking and storage," they can use it to set up their network exactly the way they want and set up storage exactly the way they want. But this means that administrators and security teams must make sure that developers don’t shoot themselves (or their neighbors) in the foot.

OPA can address these security concerns by allowing security to build policies that require all container images to be from trusted sources, prevent developers from running software as root, make sure storage is always marked with the encrypt bit and storage does not get deleted just because a pod gets restarted, that limits internet access, etc.

It can also allow administrators to make sure that policy changes don’t inadvertently do more damage than good. OPA integrates directly into the Kubernetes API server and it has complete authority to reject any resource that the admission policy says does not belong in a cluster—-whether it is compute-related, network-related, storage-related, etc. Moreover, policy can be run out-of-band to monitor results and OPA's policies can be exposed early in the development lifecycle (e.g. the CICD pipeline or even on developer laptops) if developers need feedback early.

OPA for service mesh authorization

And finally, OPA can regulate use of service mesh architectures. Often, administrators ensure that compliance regulations are satisfied by building policies into the service mesh even when modification to source code is involved. Even if you’re not embedding OPA to implement application authorization logic (the top use case discussed above), you can control the APIs microservices by putting authorization policies into the service mesh. But if you are motivated by security, you can implement policies in the service mesh to limit lateral movement within a microservice architecture.

Limiting resource usage on a cluster

It is important to define resource quotas for containers in Kubernetes, since all resources in a Kubernetes cluster are created with unbounded CPU limits and memory requests/limits by default. If you run resource-unbound containers, your system will be in risk of Denial of Service (DoS) or “noisy neighbor” scenarios. Fortunately, OPA can use resource quotas on a namespace, which will limit the number or capacity of resources granted to that namespace and restrict that namespace by defining its CPU capacity, memory, or persistent disk space.

Additionally, the OPA can limit how many pods, services, or volumes exist in each namespace, and it can restrict the maximum or minimum size of some of the resources above. The resource quotas provide default limits when none are specified and prevent users from requesting unreasonably high or low values for co

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