Security & Best Practices

Automated validation of cluster configuration against industry security standards and best practices.

How It Works

Every deployment, job, and workload in your cluster is automatically checked against security standards and best practices. Each finding includes:

• Issue description with context
• Impact explanation for security and reliability
• Remediation steps with code examples
• Severity rating to help prioritize

Clear Policy Guidance Provided

Each policy violation includes a clear explanation of the requirement and specific steps to resolve the issue.

What We Check

Our automated scans validate your workloads against:

• Pod Security Standards (industry-standard security baseline)
• Resource Configuration (preventing performance and cost issues)
• Security Contexts (protecting against vulnerabilities)
• Certificate Management (avoiding expired certs and outages)
• Image Management (ensuring reproducible deployments)

Policy Categories

Resource Management

CPU and Memory Requests/Limits

Policy: require-requests-limitsSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

All containers must specify CPU and memory requests and limits to ensure proper resource allocation and prevent resource exhaustion.

Requirements:

• CPU requests defined
• Memory requests defined
• Memory limits defined

Why It Matters:

• Prevents resource contention
• Enables proper cluster capacity planning
• Protects against out-of-memory situations

Recommendation:

resources:
  requests:
    cpu: "100m"
    memory: "128Mi"
  limits:
    memory: "256Mi"

Resource Usage Analysis

Feature: Automatic resource optimization recommendations

The platform analyzes actual resource consumption over the last 30 days and compares it to configured requests/limits.

Recommendations Provided:

• Over-provisioned: Resources set too high, wasting cluster capacity
• Under-provisioned: Resources too low, risking performance issues
• Optimal: Resources properly configured

Example:

Pod "web-app" memory request (2Gi) exceeds average usage (512Mi)
by 75%. Consider reducing to 1Gi.

Health Checks

Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes

Policy: require-pod-probesSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

All containers must define at least one probe (liveness, readiness, or startup) for proper lifecycle management.

Probe Types:

• Liveness Probe: Determines if container needs restart
• Readiness Probe: Determines if pod can receive traffic
• Startup Probe: Handles slow-starting containers

Why It Matters:

• Enables automatic failure recovery
• Prevents traffic to unhealthy pods
• Improves deployment reliability

Recommendation:

livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /healthz
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 30
  periodSeconds: 10
readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /ready
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 5

Pod Security Standards

Baseline Security

Category: Pod Security Standards - Baseline

Fundamental security controls that should be applied to all workloads.

Disallow Privileged Containers

Policy: disallow-privileged-containersSeverity: Medium

Privileged containers have unrestricted access to host resources and should be avoided.

Blocked Configuration:

securityContext:
  privileged: true # ❌ Not allowed

Disallow Host Namespaces

Policy: disallow-host-namespacesSeverity: Medium

Containers should not share host network, PID, or IPC namespaces.

Blocked Configurations:

hostNetwork: true # ❌ Not allowed
hostPID: true # ❌ Not allowed
hostIPC: true # ❌ Not allowed

Restrict Host Ports

Policy: disallow-host-portsSeverity: Medium

Containers should not bind to host ports, except within approved ranges.

Blocked Configuration:

ports:
  - containerPort: 80
    hostPort: 80 # ❌ Not allowed

Disallow Host Path Volumes

Policy: disallow-host-pathSeverity: Medium

HostPath volumes provide access to the host filesystem and pose security risks.

Blocked Configuration:

volumes:
  - name: host-volume
    hostPath: # ❌ Not allowed
      path: /data

Restrict Capabilities

Policy: disallow-capabilitiesSeverity: Medium

Linux capabilities should be dropped, with only explicitly required capabilities added.

Allowed Capabilities: AUDIT_WRITE, CHOWN, DAC_OVERRIDE, FOWNER, FSETID, KILL, MKNOD, NET_BIND_SERVICE, SETFCAP, SETGID, SETPCAP, SETUID, SYS_CHROOT

Recommended Configuration:

securityContext:
  capabilities:
    drop: ["ALL"]
    add: ["NET_BIND_SERVICE"] # Only if needed

Restrict Seccomp Profiles

Policy: restrict-seccompSeverity: Medium

Seccomp profiles must be set to RuntimeDefault or Localhost.

Required Configuration:

securityContext:
  seccompProfile:
    type: RuntimeDefault

Restrict AppArmor Profiles

Policy: restrict-apparmor-profilesSeverity: Medium

AppArmor profiles must be set to runtime/default or a defined profile.

Annotation Required:

annotations:
  container.apparmor.security.beta.kubernetes.io/nginx: runtime/default

Restrict Sysctls

Policy: restrict-sysctlsSeverity: Medium

Only safe sysctls are allowed: kernel.shm_rmid_forced, net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range, net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start, net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies, net.ipv4.ping_group_range.

Restricted Security

Category: Pod Security Standards - Restricted

Heavily restricted security controls for defense-in-depth.

Require Non-Root User

Policy: require-run-as-nonrootSeverity: Medium

Containers must run as non-root user (UID > 0).

Required Configuration:

securityContext:
  runAsNonRoot: true
  runAsUser: 1000

Disallow Privilege Escalation

Policy: disallow-privilege-escalationSeverity: Medium

Privilege escalation must be explicitly disabled.

Required Configuration:

securityContext:
  allowPrivilegeEscalation: false

Strict Capability Restrictions

Policy: disallow-capabilities-strictSeverity: Medium

All capabilities must be dropped with no additions allowed.

Required Configuration:

securityContext:
  capabilities:
    drop: ["ALL"]

Strict Seccomp Profile

Policy: restrict-seccomp-strictSeverity: Medium

Seccomp profile must be RuntimeDefault or Localhost (Unconfined not allowed).

Restrict Volume Types

Policy: restrict-volume-typesSeverity: Medium

Only specific volume types allowed: configMap, csi, downwardAPI, emptyDir, ephemeral, persistentVolumeClaim, projected, secret.

Certificate Management

One Domain Per Certificate

Policy: cert-manager-limit-dnsnamesSeverity: Medium Category: Cert-Manager

Each Certificate resource should contain only one DNS name for compatibility with applications that don't support multi-domain certificates.

Recommendation:

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: example-com
spec:
  dnsNames:
    - example.com # ✅ Single domain

Blocked Configuration:

dnsNames:
  - example.com
  - www.example.com # ❌ Multiple domains not allowed

Certificate Duration Limits

Policy: cert-manager-limit-durationSeverity: Medium Category: Cert-Manager

Certificate duration should not exceed 90 days, following best practices for certificate rotation.

Image Management

Disallow Latest Tag

Policy: disallow-latest-tagSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

Container images must use specific version tags, not latest or no tag.

Why It Matters:

• Ensures reproducible deployments
• Prevents unexpected updates
• Improves security and stability

Recommendation:

image: nginx:1.21.6 # ✅ Specific version

Blocked:

image: nginx:latest  # ❌ Not allowed
image: nginx         # ❌ Not allowed (implies latest)

Check Deprecated APIs

Policy: check-deprecated-apisSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

Resources using deprecated Kubernetes APIs are flagged for migration.

Common Deprecated APIs:

• extensions/v1beta1 → apps/v1 (Deployments)
• policy/v1beta1 → policy/v1 (PodDisruptionBudget)

Network Security

Disallow Default Namespace

Policy: disallow-default-namespaceSeverity: Medium Category: Multi-Tenancy

Workloads should not run in the default namespace.

Restrict Service External IPs

Policy: restrict-external-ipsSeverity: Medium Category: Security

Services should not use externalIPs field unless explicitly required.

Restrict NodePort Services

Policy: restrict-nodeportSeverity: Medium Category: Security

NodePort services expose ports on all nodes and should be avoided in favor of LoadBalancer or Ingress.

Ingress Security

Require Ingress Host

Policy: disallow-empty-ingress-hostSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

Ingress resources must specify explicit host rules.

Disallow Custom Snippets

Policy: disallow-ingress-nginx-custom-snippetsSeverity: Medium Category: Security

Nginx custom snippets can introduce security vulnerabilities and should be disabled.

Restrict Default Backend

Policy: restrict-ingress-defaultbackendSeverity: High Category: Best Practices

Ingress should use explicit path rules instead of default backend.

Filesystem Security

Require Read-Only Root Filesystem

Policy: require-ro-rootfsSeverity: Medium Category: Best Practices

Containers should use read-only root filesystem when possible.

Recommendation:

securityContext:
  readOnlyRootFilesystem: true

Use emptyDir volumes for writable directories:

volumeMounts:
  - name: tmp
    mountPath: /tmp
volumes:
  - name: tmp
    emptyDir: {}

Disallow CRI Socket Mount

Policy: disallow-container-sock-mountsSeverity: Medium Category: Security

Containers should not mount container runtime sockets (/var/run/docker.sock, /run/containerd/containerd.sock).

Accessing Policy Results

Via Web Console

1. Navigate to cluster in portal
2. Select namespace or specific workload
3. View Best Practices tab
4. Review violations and recommendations

Dashboard Features:

• Policy compliance score
• Violation breakdown by severity
• Trend analysis over time
• Detailed remediation steps

Policy Violation Structure

Violations are grouped by preset (BEST_PRACTICES, MULTI_TENANCY, PSS_BASELINE, PSS_RESTRICTED, OTHER). Each violation itself only includes:

• Policy: Identifier of the rule
• Message: Description of violation
• Severity: INFO, LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH

Compliance Tracking

Compliance Score

Overall health metric based on policy violations, deducted from 100:

• High violations: -20 points each
• Medium violations: -10 points each
• Low violations: -5 points each
• Info violations: -2 points each

The score floors at 0.

Historical Trends

Track compliance improvements over time:

• Daily compliance scores
• New vs resolved violations
• Most common violation types
• Resource-level compliance history

Related Resources

• Kubernetes Resources
• Monitoring & Metrics
• Alert Reference
• Setup Instructions