Walls Within Walls: What if Your Attacker Knows Parkour?

What happens if an attacker escapes a container and compromises your node? Is it game over for the whole cluster, or can you limit the blast radius? Whether it be for defense in depth or multi-tenancy …

What happens if an attacker escapes a container and compromises your node? Is it game over for the whole cluster, or can you limit the blast radius? Whether it be for defense in depth or multi-tenancy, it is important to understand the security boundaries in your cluster. In this talk, we’ll discuss various isolation approaches and evaluate them through the eyes of an attacker who has compromised a node and is looking to propagate.We’ll deep dive on ‘node isolation’: using Kubernetes scheduling to execute workloads on separate nodes, and demonstrate live attacks and defences to educate about strengths and weaknesses of this strategy. We’ll also discuss progress made by SIG-Auth in this area over the past few releases. After this talk you will understand when node isolation is or isn’t an appropriate security mechanism, the steps to implement it, and what some alternatives are.