kube-bench VS trivy

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

Trivy Owner/Maintainer: Aqua Security Age: First released on GitHub on May 7th, 2019 License: Apache License 2.0 backward-compatible with tfsec

Trivy. A Simple and Comprehensive Vulnerability Scanner for Containers.

Using Trivy:

Trivy is a mature and comprehensive open source tool from Aqua Security that supports scanning multiple sources, from file systems to containers and VMs. Trivy also looks beyond vulnerabilities, to scan licenses, secrets, infrastructure as code misconfiguration, and more.

I would suggest to think about the thread model that you are facing so you can have a better mental model of the weak points of your environment. The very very big majority of these attacks will be automated probing for publicly known vulnerabilities or default credentials. That means the maintainers of the software you are running and the channels on which their updates are shipped to you and deployed are very important factors. For software that is not installed from a trusted and well maintained source (e.g. Ubuntus main repository), you want to make extra sure that vulnerabilities are updated. E.g. your deployed docker containers might contain security issues, you can run checks on these with tools like trivy. The same is also true for appliances, in case your router or firewall contains a software vulnerability, how will you be notified and how will the required updates be deployed?