Using Admission Controllers
In this post I will show you how you can use Admission Controllers.
Parst of the K8S Security series
- Part1: Best Practices to keeping Kubernetes Clusters Secure
- Part2: Kubernetes Hardening Guide with CIS 1.6 Benchmark
- Part3: RKE2 The Secure Kubernetes Engine
- Part4: RKE2 Install With cilium
- Part5: Kubernetes Certificate Rotation
- Part6: Hardening Kubernetes with seccomp
- Part7a: RKE2 Pod Security Policy
- Part7b: Kubernetes Pod Security Admission
- Part7c: Pod Security Standards using Kyverno
- Part8: Kubernetes Network Policy
- Part9: Kubernetes Cluster Policy with Kyverno
- Part10: Using Admission Controllers
- Part11a: Image security Admission Controller
- Part11b: Image security Admission Controller V2
- Part11c: Image security Admission Controller V3
- Part12: Continuous Image security
- Part13: K8S Logging And Monitoring
- Part14: Kubernetes audit logs and Falco
- Part15a Image Signature Verification with Connaisseur
- Part15b Image Signature Verification with Connaisseur 2.0
- Part15c Image Signature Verification with Kyverno
- Part16a Backup your Kubernetes Cluster
- Part16b How to Backup Kubernetes to git?
- Part17a Kubernetes and Vault integration
- Part17b Kubernetes External Vault integration
- Part18a: ArgoCD and kubeseal to encript secrets
- Part18b: Flux2 and kubeseal to encrypt secrets
- Part18c: Flux2 and Mozilla SOPS to encrypt secrets
- Part19: ArgoCD auto image updater
- Part20: Secure k3s with gVisor
- Part21: How to use imagePullSecrets cluster-wide??
- Part22: Automatically change registry in pod definition
What is an Admission Controller
An admission controller is a piece of code that intercepts requests to the Kubernetes API server prior to persistence of the object, but after the request is authenticated and authorized. […] Admission controllers may be “validating”, “mutating”, or both. Mutating controllers may modify the objects they admit; validating controllers may not. […] If any of the controllers in either phase reject the request, the entire request is rejected immediately and an error is returned to the end-user. (Source: Kubernetes Website )
In a nutshell, Kubernetes admission controllers are plugins that govern and enforce how the cluster is used. They can be thought of as a gatekeeper that intercepts (authenticated) API requests and may change the request object or deny the request altogether.
How do I turn on an admission controller?
A list of previously implemented controllers comes with Kubernetes, or you can write your own. To do so you must enable them in the kube-apiserver
The Kubernetes API server flag enable-admission-plugins takes a comma-delimited list of admission control plugins to invoke prior to modifying objects in the cluster. For example, the following command line enables the NamespaceLifecycle and the LimitRanger admission control plugins:
kube-apiserver --enable-admission-plugins=NamespaceLifecycle,LimitRanger ...
What is an admission webhook?
There are two special admission controllers in the list included in the Kubernetes apiserver: MutatingAdmissionWebhook and ValidatingAdmissionWebhook. These are special admission controllers that send admission requests to external HTTP callbacks and receive admission responses. If these two admission controllers are enabled, a Kubernetes administrator can create and configure an admission webhook in the cluster.
Validating webhooks can reject a request, but they cannot modify the object they are receiving in the admission request, while mutating webhooks can modify objects by creating a patch that will be sent back in the admission response. If a webhook rejects a request, an error is returned to the end-user.
Why do I need admission controllers?
Security: Admission controllers can increase security by mandating a reasonable security baseline across an entire namespace or cluster. The built-in PodSecurityPolicy admission controller is perhaps the most prominent example; it can be used for disallowing containers from running as root or making sure the container’s root filesystem is always mounted read-only, for example. Further use cases that can be realized by custom, webhook-based admission controllers include:
- Allow pulling images only from specific registries known to the enterprise, while denying unknown image registries.
- Reject deployments that do not meet security standards. For example, containers using the privileged flag can circumvent a lot of security checks. This risk could be mitigated by a webhook-based admission controller that either rejects such deployments (validating) or overrides the privileged flag, setting it to false.