4.2.4 - Minimize the admission of containers wishing to share the host network namespace (Automated)

Views:

Profile applicability: Level 1

Do not generally permit containers to be run with the hostNetwork flag set to true.

A container running in the host's network namespace could access the local loopback device, and could access network traffic to and from other pods.

There should be at least one admission control policy defined which does not permit containers to share the host network namespace.

If you need to run containers which require access to the host's network namespaces, 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.

Note

By default, there are no restrictions on the creation of hostNetwork containers.

Impact

Pods defined with spec.hostNetwork: 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 hostNetwork containers.

Given that manually checking each pod can be time-consuming, especially in large environments, you can use a more automated approach to filter out pods where hostNetwork is set to true. Here’s a command using kubectl and jq:

Option 1

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] |
select(.spec.hostNetwork == true) |
"\(.metadata.namespace)/\(.metadata.name)"'

Option 2

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq '.items[] |
select(.metadata.namespace != "kube-system" and .spec.hostNetwork ==
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 hostNetwork flag 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 which has user workloads to restrict the admission of hostNetwork containers.