The security issue strikes at some of the basic reasons for the rising popularity of containers as an architecture and Kubernetes as an orchestration mechanism.
The first major security vulnerability – 9.8 out of a possible 10 – in Kubernetes was disclosed earlier this week.
The vulnerability (CVE-2018-1002105) allows for privilege escalation and can be accessed by both authorized and unauthorized users. For authorized users with “attach,” “exec,” or “portforward” privileges, escalating those to admin privileges that allow any process to be executed is trivial.
And for anyone at all, an API used in three specific modules will allow a query that returns values that can be used to raise privileges to admin level for any API deployed on the container cluster.
Fortunately for Kubernetes users, two fixes are available for the vulnerability. The first is to update any deployed Kubernetes instances to versions 1.10.11, 1.11.5, 1.12.3 and 1.13.0-rc1. Each has been patched to remediate the vulnerability. Major cloud service providers also have announced that they have patched their instances, and the question is appropriate for any Kubernetes provider.
Read more: Dark Reading
