kube-bench VS docker-bench-security

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

Scanning your container images for vulnerabilities is a good approach. But this scanning is not one time job, it should be done regularly (weekly, monthly, etc.) You need to follow vulnerability reports and fix all of the vulnerabilities as soon as possible. I recommend some open-source tools that could be useful: Trivy, Docker-Bench, Grype.

For Docker configuration I have used this in the past (it utilizes the CIS Docker Benchmark): https://github.com/docker/docker-bench-security

So the main tool to scan against the CIS Docker benchmark (I'm presuming that's the one you're interested in) is https://github.com/docker/docker-bench-security .

git clone https://github.com/docker/docker-bench-security.git cd docker-bench-security sudo sh docker-bench-security.sh

when deploying images on cloud, I always run it thru "docker bench security" It helps finding potential security holes in my images.

Use Docker Bench for Security to audit your container images

Other tools you can use are linux-bench, docker-bench, kube-bench, kube-hunter, kube-striker, Cloud Custodian, OVAL, and OS Query.

I run https://github.com/docker/docker-bench-security against my environment. I would determine what was non-applicable/not scored and then start with scored. Then I would do not scored. My team had made their own Dockerfiles when I started and just grabbed whatever image/version and getting things baselined was not fun. I had to do this for docker-compose and stay on version 2 yml as otherwise I had to go to swarm.