Security controls inside workloads are the responsibility of the customer in the Shared Responsibility Model. As discussed earlier in this document, we often suggest that organizations explore using configuration management tools like SaltStack to apply and audit configuration settings on workloads. This has benefits of saving time and ensuring security consistency, but also simplifying template management.
Ideas to Consider:
Monitoring and configuration management systems are two examples of systems that have privileged access to an organization’s workloads. High-profile attacks have demonstrated that these types of systems are targets for attackers to breach, allowing them to move laterally throughout the organization with ease. Are there sufficient controls protecting other guests from monitoring breaches? Does your organization use change control and source code control techniques to manage and test changes to configurations? How will you know if an attacker has gained access to that system?
Workloads deployed in a Kubernetes environment require some additional considerations to prevent containers from gaining too many permissions on the node’s operating system. Without protections in place, containers may be able to access host resources such as processes, volumes, or network access. To account for this, consider using Kubernetes admission controllers to prevent unwanted access to the host operating system.
