cfn_nag VS kube-bench

.pre-commit-config.yaml – contains the cfn-lint and cfn_nag pre-commit hooks.

For generic CloudFormation templates, check CFN-NAG.

If you use CDK, you should implement CDK nag; otherwise, use cfn-nag.

cfn_nag

CodeBuild will run a linting check against the CloudFormation Template using cfn-lint and will then run cfn-nag to check for patterns that indicate insecure resources within the CloudFormation template.

Security checks for the Cloudformation stack using cfn-nag

cdk-nag contains several Aspects to check your applications for best practices. It is especially useful if you need to be HIPAA-compliant or have other compliance requirements. It is inspired by cfn_nag which is a a tool checking for patterns in your CloudFormation templates.

cfn-lint and cfn_nag or other tools of that nature to check as you write so you don't need to continually try to deploy only to find that you've done something dumb.

There is another tool called cfn_nag that can check your code for potentially any insecure infrastructure. When you read the documentation around this tool, the author says it can check for things such as:

I recently wanted to use the cfn-nag tool on some templates I was writing but couldn't find any instructions to install on Windows, but I have found a way to do it.

However, no matter how well our applications are secured, the security of our entire IT environment ultimately depends on the security of our infrastructure. Therefore, in the lab to follow, we will shift our focus away from Kubernetes workloads and instead explore how we can evaluate and improve upon the security of our Kubernetes clusters with kube-bench, the industry-leading Kubernetes benchmarking solution developed by Aqua.

The official repository can be found here with detailed installation instructions.

curl -L [https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench/releases/download/v0.6.10/kube-bench_0.6.10_linux_amd64.deb](https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench/releases/download/v0.6.2/kube-bench_0.6.2_linux_amd64.deb) -o kube-bench_0.6.10_linux_amd64.deb

I haven't used Kubernetes for a while, but shouldn't kube-bench (1) be enough? Do you have to check anything manually?

(1) https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench

kube-bench checks whether Kubernetes is deployed securely by running the checks documented in the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark. We can deploy kube-bench as a Job that runs daily and consume its report in CI/CD to pass or fail the pipeline based on the level of severity.

kube-bench can be executed as a simple command on the host, as a container on the host using Docker command, or as a job inside Kubernetes Cluster. In case it is run inside a container/pod, it will need access to the PID namespace of the host system. The methods to run kube-bench in AKS, EKS, GKE, On-prem cluster, Openshift and ACK (Alibaba Cloud Container Service For Kubernetes) are different but well documented.

Check this out: kube-bench - CIS Benchmark

Kube-bench, written as a Go application, is deployable as a container. Ready-made job.yaml files make it easy to run Kube-bench inside a Kubernetes cluster or on a managed Kubernetes service, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or OpenShift. Here's a link to Kube-Bench on Github

kube-bench - Checks whether Kubernetes is deployed securely by running CIS Kubernetes Benchmark