Profile Applicability: Level 1
Do not generally permit containers to be run with the
securityContext.privileged
flag set to true
.Privileged containers have access to all Linux Kernel capabilities and devices. A
container running with full privileges can do almost everything that the host can
do. This flag exists to allow special use-cases, like manipulating the network stack
and accessing devices. There should be at least one admission control policy defined
which does not permit privileged containers. If you need to run privileged containers,
this should be defined in a separate policy and you should carefully check to ensure
that only limited service accounts and users are given permission to use that policy.
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NoteBy default, there are no restrictions on the creation of privileged containers.
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Impact
Pods defined with
spec.containers[].securityContext.privileged: true
, spec.initContainers[].securityContext.privileged: true
and spec.ephemeralContainers[].securityContext.privileged: true
will not be permitted.Audit
List the policies in use for each namespace in the cluster, ensure that each policy
disallows the admission of privileged containers.
Since manually searching through each pod's configuration might be tedious, especially
in environments with many pods, you can use a more automated approach with grep or
other command-line tools.
Here's an example of how you might approach this with a combination of kubectl, grep,
and shell scripting for a more automated solution:
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.containers[].securityContext.privileged == true) | .metadata.name'
OR
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.containers[].securityContext.privileged == true) | select(.metadata.namespace != "kube-system" and .metadata.namespace != "gatekeeper-system" and .metadata.namespace != "azure-arc" and .metadata.namespace != "azure-extensions-usage-system") | "\(.metadata.name) \(.metadata.namespace)"'
When creating a Pod Security Policy,
["kube-system", "gatekeeper-system", "azure-arc", "azure-extensions-usage-system"]
namespaces are excluded by default.This command uses jq, a command-line JSON processor, to parse the JSON output from
kubectl get pods
and filter out pods where any container has the securityContext.privileged
flag set to true.![]() |
NoteYou might need to adjust the command depending on your specific requirements and the
structure of your pod specifications.
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Remediation
Add policies to each namespace in the cluster which has user workloads to restrict
the admission of privileged containers.
To enable PSA for a namespace in your cluster, set the
pod-security.kubernetes.io/enforce
label with the policy value you want to enforce.kubectl label --overwrite ns NAMESPACE pod- security.kubernetes.io/enforce=restricted
The above command enforces the restricted policy for the NAMESPACE namespace.
You can also enable Pod Security Admission for all your namespaces. For example:
kubectl label --overwrite ns --all pod- security.kubernetes.io/warn=baseline
Pod Security Policies and Assignments can be found by searching for Policies in the
Azure Portal.
A detailed step-by-step guide can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/concepts/policy-for-kubernetes