Profile Applicability: Level 1
Do not generally permit containers to be run with the
hostPID
flag set to true
.A container running in the host's process ID (PID) namespace can inspect processes
running outside the container. If the container also has access to ptrace capabilities,
this can be used to escalate privileges outside of the container. There should be
at least one admission control policy defined which does not permit containers to
share the host PID namespace. If you need to run containers which require
hostPID
, 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.![]() |
NoteBy default, there are no restrictions on the creation of
hostPID containers. |
Impact
Pods defined with
spec.hostPID: true
will not be permitted unless they are run under a specific policy.Audit
List the policies in use for each namespace in the cluster, ensuring that each policy
disallows the admission of
hostPID
containers.Search for the
hostPID
flag. In the YAML output, look for the hostPID
setting under the spec section to check if it is set to true
.kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.hostPID == true) | "\(.metadata.namespace)/\(.metadata.name)"'
OR
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.hostPID == 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.The command retrieves all pods across all namespaces in JSON format, then uses jq
to filter out those with the
hostPID
set to true
and finally formats the output to show the namespace and name of each matching pod.Remediation
Add policies to each namespace in the cluster that has user workloads to restrict
the admission of
hostPID
containers.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