When is admin not admin?, when it's super-admin!

I came across an interesting change in how Kubeadm based clusters handle initial credential setup in Kubernetes 1.29 and later, so thought it was worth a quick post. Smarticu5 had a really unusual error, which was that on a newly created Kubeadm cluster he was getting a forbidden error when using the default admin.conf credential created by Kubeadm.

Exploiting CVE-2023-5044

Recently several new CVEs in the ingress nginx controller for Kubernetes were announced. I thought I’d take a closer look at one of them, CVE-2023-5044. Whilst there’s some details in the CVE announcement and some hints in a post from the CVE reporter here there’s not any actual PoC that I could find, so I decided to see if I could write one!

Fun with privileged container breakout

One of the truisms of container security is that when a container is run as privileged (in the sense of the Docker flag, not just running as the root user) it’s insecure and possible to break out. However, there aren’t always great examples of how to break out of a privileged container in practice.

Hardware review - Topton AMD Ryzen 7 5700U

I’ve been thinking about a project where I could travel to conferences with hardware to run a workshop that doesn’t rely on cloud resources (to avoid those concerns about network access or cloud uptime) and of course, the first part of any project like that is the fun part, buying the hardware! As I’d promised a review to a couple of people on-line, here it is.

Getting a VS Code Server running on EC2

As part of the preparations for the workshop on container security that myself and Iain Smart ran at this year’s Steelcon, there were some concerns that our standard option of SSH access might be blocked by the venue’s Wi-Fi, so a backup plan was in order. As a result, we were looking into how to provide a browser based terminal for students running on a host in AWS EC2.

Fun with container images - Bypassing vulnerability scanners

At Last week’s Kubecon EU I was fortunate enough to be on stage with Ian Coldwater, Brad Geesaman, and Duffie Cooley presenting a talk called “Malicious Compliance: Reflections on Trusting Container Scanners”.

Let's talk about Kubelet authorization

I’ve been meaning to write a post about Kubelet authorization for a while now, and as there have been some posts this week where it got a mention, now seems like a good time!

Let's talk about anonymous access to Kubernetes

This week there were some articles about the Dero Cryptojacking operation and one of the details about what the attackers did caught my eye. It was mentioned that they were attacking clusters that allowed anonymous access to the Kubernetes API. Exactly how and why anonymous access is possible to Kubernetes is kind of an interesting topic that touches on a few different areas, so I thought I’d write a bit about it.

Fun with Containers - Adding tracking to your images

Last year I was taking a look at the OCI Image specification and I came across something kind of interesting, which is how you can get a container image to ping a URL when it’s pulled to a host almost like a tracking cookie. Needless to say this isn’t me dropping 0-day, I reported this to the containerd and podman security addresses back in October 2022 and the consensus appears to be that whilst this may have some security implications it’s not dreadfully serious in most cases and it’s part of the spec, so unlikely to change.

Fun with Caddy - SSRF Testing

Recently I’ve been looking at SSRF in Kubernetes. When testing for SSRF, I find it very useful to have a webserver/reverse proxy that I control and can configure to do a number of tasks. I’ve been using Caddy for this. In this post I’ll show you how to use Caddy to test for SSRF.