Profile applicability: Level 1
Do not generally permit containers to be run with the
hostIPC
flag set to true.A container running in the host's IPC namespace can use IPC to interact with processes
outside the container.
There should be at least one admission control policy defined which does not permit
containers to share the host IPC namespace.
If you need to run containers which require
hostIPC
, 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
hostIPC containers. |
Impact
Pods defined with
spec.hostIPC: 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, ensure that each policy
disallows the admission of
hostIPC
containers.In the YAML output, look for the
hostIPC
setting under the spec section to check if it is set to true
.Option 1
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.hostIPC == true) | "\(.metadata.namespace)/\(.metadata.name)"'
Option 2
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq '.items[] | select(.metadata.namespace != "kube-system" and .spec.hostIPC == true) | {pod: .metadata.name, namespace: .metadata.namespace, container: .spec.containers[].name}'
When creating a Pod Security Policy,
["kube-system"]
namespaces are excluded by default.This command retrieves all pods across all namespaces in JSON format, then uses jq
to filter out those with the
hostIPC
flag set to true
, and finally it formats the output to show the namespace and name of each matching
pod.Remediation
Add policies to each namespace in the cluster which has user workloads to restrict
the admission of
hostIPC
containers.