Probably the hardest part about this. Private networks with private domains. Who runs the private CA, updates DNS records, issues certs, revokes, keeps the keys secure, embeds the keychain in every container's cert stack, and enforces validation?
That is a shit-ton of stuff to set up (and potentially screw up) which will take a small team probably months to complete. How many teams are actually going to do this, versus just terminating at the load balancer and everything in the cluster running plaintext?
We really need something to help make the process simpler, like how Let's Encrypt made public HTTPS so much easier to do for even the smallest of websites.
Like I said: differently complex but it’s a general solution to the problem and doesn’t require changing more “inner” things as much.
How are these containers getting the different secrets they need to identify themselves? Are you attaching IAM roles to them to get secrets from some secret store?
But that's not really the issue. You still have a big plaintext network with a bunch of random stuff talking, no mutual auth and no security controls other than segmentation. That's the tricky problem that mTLS and service meshes attempt to solve.
Outside of k8s (where one has greater control over how specifically e.g. Wireguard is deployed). Again, there is no plaintext outside of localhost. Wireguard is mutual auth, I’m not sure why you think it isn’t. Wireguard + firewall is security control since, well, you have mutual auth so rules can be applied per-client.
But 1) kernel hackers won't implement it, 2) app devs are too possessive of their stack/codebase to just use one standard implementation/interface, and 3) security people are too paranoid to leave something "so important" up to the OS so they'd rather everyone implement it poorly/fragmentedly.
We learned recently that for a long time, the primary producers of cryptographic telephones was a single Swiss company. Owned by the CIA.
If security were easy, a lot of intelligence agencies would have a bad day.
Security doesn’t have to be this hard. But the powers that be seem to prefer complex, complicated systems, like DNS or SELinux.
It could be easier. Much easier.
As far as a service mesh, check out Linkerd! I find Istio much harder to setup and manage. Linkerd is super simple and has always worked pretty much out of the box for me.
This may be fully acceptable for you, but should not be glossed over.
From my experience, linkerd had the most seamless deployment to get to the most feature-complete out-of-the box experience with monitoring etc. But as it goes with these things there’s a much bigger amortized cost in terms of magic to unwind if you need to integrate it.
Depending on the existing size and complexity of your stack those months can be cut down to weeks or even days.
I don't mean to trivialize the time and expertise needed to set up and manage, but if you can afford to run a microservice architecture on k8s already it's definitely not untenable.
If anything, setting up the whole things within Kubernetes ecosystem can be much easier with the available operators and automation frameworks like cert manager and/or Istio.
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.
>It includes hardening strategies to avoid common misconfigurations and guide system administrators and developers of National Security Systems on how to deploy Kubernetes...
> 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.
> Works cited:
> [1] Center for Internet Security, "Kubernetes," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://cisecurity.org/resources/?type=benchmark&search=kube... .
> [2] DISA, "Kubernetes STIG," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://dl.dod.cyber.mil.wp- content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Kubernetes_V1R1_STIG.zip. [Accessed 8 July 2021]
> [3] The Linux Foundation, "Kubernetes Documentation," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ . [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [4] The Linux Foundation, "11 Ways (Not) to Get Hacked," 18 07 2018. [Online]. Available: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/07/18/11-ways-not-to-get-hac... . [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [5] MITRE, "Unsecured Credentials: Cloud Instance Metadata API." MITRE ATT&CK, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1552/005/. [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [6] CISA, "Analysis Report (AR21-013A): Strengthening Security Configurations to Defend Against Attackers Targeting Cloud Services." Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 14 January 2021. [Online]. Available:https://us- cert.cisa.gov/ncas/analysis-reports/ar21-013a [Accessed 8 July 2021].
How can k8s and zero-trust cooccur?
> CISA encourages administrators and organizations review NSA’s guidance on Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model to help secure sensitive data, systems, and services.
"Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model" (2021, as well) https://media.defense.gov/2021/Feb/25/2002588479/-1/-1/0/CSI...
In addition to "zero [trust]", I also looked for the term "SBOM". From p.32//39:
> As updates are deployed, administrators should also keep up with removing any old components that are no longer needed from the environment. Using a managed Kubernetes service can help to automate upgrades and patches for Kubernetes, operating systems, and networking protocols. *However, administrators must still patch and upgrade their containerized applications.*
"Existing artifact vuln scanners, databases, and specs?" https://github.com/google/osv/issues/55
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.
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!"
We also for any container that makes requests that does not have the mechanisms for adding certificates we have to rebuild the containers in the disconnected env to insert certificates to allow communication.
Makes daily life really interesting
Maybe a disgruntled sys admin decides to capture data coming in from the load balancer between the service(s) and sell it to the highest bidder. If traffic is encrypted between the load balancer and underlying service, it makes it much harder to do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
(Google has since added encryption to its internal entworks.)
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
'dwheeler is now the Linux Foundation's Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security.
https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/
Notably I know the Rust compiler has been verified in this way (or at least certain versions of it have been verified), but it shouldn't be hard to do the same for any language with multiple independent implementations.
False-positives abound on these scanners.
How about our mainstream OSes incorporate that kind of permission system similar to what we have in mobile OSes already have today?
Having dedicated network appliances acting as firewalls means from a security perspective you need to compromise the local machine and then also compromise a dedicated, hardened external system as well. It vastly ups the difficulty barrier.
Again, as a non technical person, why a software needs access to entire internet instead of whitelisted domains specific to its requirements is beyond me, since we already know how UNIX permission system works. Is it so hard to extend that to networks? Especially since everything is file in UNIX? Kindly pardon my ignorance :-)
> - Use firewalls to limit unneeded network connectivity and encryption to protect confidentiality.
Are we still on this? Why isn't anyone pushing for zero trust? A concept made significantly easier to achieve thanks to container orchestration.
- Scan for vulns and misconfigs: I regularly update the underlying distro images, and use security scanning software to monitor dependencies, and regularly update them.
- Run with least privilege: I create a separate, temporary user account (no login, no shell) for each browser and service which has no elevated privileges, as well as run that browser and its service in a group and cgroup that restricts disk, bandwidth, CPU, and memory using block quotas, cgroups, tc, iptables and active monitoring and termination.
- Use network separation to isolate: RBI is basically a network isolation layer between the client (where the human interacts), and the server (where the browser actually runs.) I also don't have any privileges (service accounts, SSH keys, trusted IPs) on any of the machines and they're all single tenant and run inside GCE.
- Use firewalls to lock down connectivity + encryption: I use GCE firewall rules and iptables drop rules to block access to GCP metadata endpoints, as well as to other machines in the subnet. Also, every network request is encrypted (HTTP is https/TLS, WebSocket is wss/TLS, WebRTC is encrypted by default).
- Use strong auth to limit user access: For running the processes I use temporary users. For persistent browser sessions I use persistent users (either system native, or in a DB, always with bcrypt salted hashed passwords). For SaaS and resource control I use high entropy random API keys between each service layer. But I could improve my game for keeping secrets out of private git repos and separating code and config, ideally automatically. I could also improve my game to limit administrator access (right now I just have a single role, with God power, but I should create an admin role with power limited to a project, ideally even on a per-customer level).
- Use log autditing: I do this, but only manually, using various grepping and inspection of various logs, including last and lastb, as well as the service internal logs. This is likely something I could improve as well.
- Review all k8s settings: I don't use k8s or docker, just run services in this custom sandbox on GCE instances. I see that as both a way to limit attack service and complexity as well as minimize some overheads for maintenance and performance. In the longer term these things are worth exploring.
Thanks a lot for the TLDR. For more info on my RBI work check out https://github.com/i5ik/ViewFinder
- Run containers and Pods with the least privileges possible.
- Use network separation to control the amount of damage a compromise can cause.
- Use firewalls to limit unneeded network connectivity and encryption to protect confidentiality.
- Use strong authentication and authorization to limit user and administrator access as well as to limit the attack surface.
- Use log auditing so that administrators can monitor activity and be alerted to potential malicious activity.
- Periodically review all Kubernetes settings and use vulnerability scans to help ensure risks are appropriately accounted for and security patches are applied.