On Prescription or Off Prescription?: An Empirical Study of Community-prescribed Security Configurations for Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source software system that helps practitioners in automatically deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Information technology (IT) organizations, such as IBM, Spotify, and Capital One, use Kubernetes to manage their containers and reported benefits in the deployment process. However, recent security breaches and survey results among practitioners suggest that Kubernetes deployment can be vulnerable to attacks due to misconfiguration and not following security best practices. This research explores how malicious users can perform potential security exploits from the violations of Kubernetes security best practices. We explore how attacks can be conducted such as denial of service attacks against one of the security best practices violations in Kubernetes manifests. In addition, we are exploring potential exploits in the Kubernetes cluster to propose mitigation strategies to secure the Kubernetes cluster.