kube-bench VS gatekeeper

2. Kubebench: https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench Kubebench is an open-source tool that checks whether Kubernetes is deployed according to security best practices as defined in the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark.

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

When the Gatekeeper validatingwebhook came up, I was really worried that'd be the issue! Regardless I'd recommend anyone who cares about their cluster not collapsing to change the gatekeeper webhook to only intercept resources you care about: https://github.com/open-policy-agent/gatekeeper/pull/1806

Kyverno adds an extra layer of security where only the allowed type of manifest is deployed onto kubernetes, otherwise, it will reject or we can set validationFailureAction to audit which only logs the policy violation message for reporting. Kubewarden and Gatekeeper are alternative tools available to enforce policies on Kubernetes CRD.

Now, we have the hardest part resolved and let's turn our attention to the OPA Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper uses the OPA Constraint Framework to describe and enforce policy. Right now there are mainly 3 parts we should pay attention:

They enable you to establish the policies and regulations that govern cluster deployments and applications. Using predefined policies, policy engines can dynamically modify or create configurations. Policy engines such as Gatekeeper and Kyverno can be leveraged to meet legal and compliance requirements while maintaining operational flexibility and development speed.

Setup policy around what resource requirements can be requested by an app per environment. OPA and gatekeeper or kyverno can help. Setup access control for who can create or modify apps.

OPA Gatekeeper is an open source, general purpose policy engine. OPA decouples policy decisions from other responsibilities of an application, like those commonly referred to as business logic. OPA works equally well making decisions for Kubernetes, Microservices, functional application authorization and more, thanks to its single unified policy language.