Securing Kubernetes: A Study on the Measures for Enhancing Control and Data Plane Security

The idea of containerization has gripped the entire IT industry. All kinds of enterprise, embedded, and cloud applications are methodically containerized, curated, and deposited in public and private container image repositories. Such an arrangement facilitates agile and accelerated software engineering. However, for the containerization paradigm to achieve the widely articulated success, there is a need for container orchestration platform solutions for smoothly tackling the container life-cycle management tasks. Kubernetes is the market-leading, modular, and multifaceted platform for simplifying and streamlining the aspects of automated containerized applications deployment and management. Kubernetes is made up of many moving parts and hence their local as well as remote interactions are beset with security challenges. Building and sustaining Kubernetes (K8s) clusters for running and managing containerized applications in a secure and safe manner is the need of the hour. In this paper, we illustrate the various security vulnerabilities of K8s clusters and how they can be surmounted through security enforcement processes, practices, and products.