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0 pointsdevy4y ago0 comments

> That is a shit-ton of stuff to set up (and potentially screw up) which will take a small team probably months to complete.

Agree! This is why that "Kubernetes Hardening Guidance" is for NSA, not for startups.

Resource needs aside, keeping basic AppSec/InfoSec hygiene is a strong recommendation. Also there are tons of startups that are trying to provide solutions/services to solve that also. A lot of times, it's worth the money.

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zeckalpha4y ago

This guidance is provided by the NSA, not for the NSA.

ROARosen4y ago

From the doc:

>It includes hardening strategies to avoid common misconfigurations and guide system administrators and developers of National Security Systems on how to deploy Kubernetes...

zeckalpha4y ago

Also:

> Purpose > NSA and CISA developed this document in furtherance of their respective cybersecurity missions, including their responsibilities to develop and issue cybersecurity specifications and mitigations. This information may be shared broadly to reach all appropriate stakeholders.

NSA has multiple mandates and many stakeholders.

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throwaway9843934y ago

I wonder about that. What are the attack vectors within a K8s cluster to necessitate inter-cluster transport encryption?

smarterclayton4y ago

Most (but not all) overlay networks are implemented in kernel. If you compromise one node in a cluster, you can fairly trivially snoop traffic, bias other nodes to send traffic through you, or listen via various mechanisms such that you can intercept traffic flowing between workloads not actually located on the compromised node.

So always encrypt everything unless you’re in a very rare environment with central network control that cannot be compromised or intercepted from a given machine.

throwaway9843934y ago

This would be less of a concern if the cluster's pods were Firecrackers, yes?

AWS EKS on Fargate has a dedicated ENI and kernel per pod; the only way to intercept the traffic is when it crosses a network, or with flow control logs. Or if somebody hacked the control plane, but that's always "Game over man, game over!"

killjoywashere4y ago

And if you've been in that kind of rare environment, those people encrypt everything. They'd encrypt their license plate if they could. You want paranoid, look up laser microphones.

raesene94y ago

Although with many clusters, compromising a single node is likely to lead to cluster compromise as it allows for all the service account tokens assigned to workloads running on the compromised node to be used by the attacker :)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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zeckalpha4y ago

This guidance is provided by the NSA, not for the NSA.

ROARosen4y ago

From the doc:

>It includes hardening strategies to avoid common misconfigurations and guide system administrators and developers of National Security Systems on how to deploy Kubernetes...

zeckalpha4y ago

Also:

NSA has multiple mandates and many stakeholders.

1 more reply

throwaway9843934y ago

I wonder about that. What are the attack vectors within a K8s cluster to necessitate inter-cluster transport encryption?

smarterclayton4y ago

So always encrypt everything unless you’re in a very rare environment with central network control that cannot be compromised or intercepted from a given machine.

throwaway9843934y ago

This would be less of a concern if the cluster's pods were Firecrackers, yes?

killjoywashere4y ago

And if you've been in that kind of rare environment, those people encrypt everything. They'd encrypt their license plate if they could. You want paranoid, look up laser microphones.

raesene94y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse