Navigating the Landscape of Kubernetes Security Threats and Challenges

Abstract

Kubernetes has become the new standard for container orchestration, where it allows such organizations to manage applications. Alas, these features make it quite difficult to secure the containerized workloads, primarily this is due to its distributed nature and complexity that inherently poses multiple security threats. This paper aims to provide an overview on how Kubernetes works more specifically about the API Server, the Scheduler and the Controller Manager but also to discuss about the integrated security mechanisms such as the RBAC or Network Policies.  Some of the threat categories discussed in detail are misconfiguration threats, container threats, network-oriented attacks, attacks on API servers, and supply chain attacks. This research elaborates on how these vulnerabilities appear, how they affect Kubernetes environments, and ways of preventing such, such as implementing strong configurations, encryption, constant monitoring, as well as dependency control. Through such aspects, this work highlights the need for incorporating active multidimensional approach to security to counter new threats. The insights presented herein are intended to assist organizations using Kubernetes to derive practical knowledge of methods to protect containerized applications while preventing and mitigating modern security threats.