Mario Kahlhofer

Michael Krieger, Markus Gierlinger, Farooq Shaikh et al.

Kubernetes has become the industry standard for orchestrating containers in microservice-based software architectures. While several hardening guidelines and scanning tools for securing Kubernetes clusters and deployments have emerged in recent years, their differing guidance and outputs often lead to inconsistent configuration and prioritization decisions. This work presents a systematic comparison of eight commonly used Kubernetes hardening guidelines. Through this comparison and the inclusion of best practices, we established a benchmark of 79 Kubernetes configuration recommendations and conducted the a structured empirical evaluation of ten popular static configuration scanning tools and their scoring outputs. Our findings reveal substantial disparities in the coverage of configuration issues across hardening guidelines and scanners, as well as inconsistencies in how configuration issues are scored and ranked by different scanners. These results highlight the need for more standardized, transparent, and consistent approaches to risk and severity assessment of Kubernetes configuration issues.

Mario Kahlhofer, Michael Hölzl, Andreas Berger

Rapidly-changing cloud environments that consist of heavily interconnected components are difficult to secure. Existing solutions often try to correlate many weak indicators to identify and reconstruct multi-step cyber attacks. The lack of a true, causal link between most of these indicators still leaves administrators with a lot of false-positives to browse through. We argue that cyber deception can improve the precision of attack detection systems, if used in a structured, and automatic way, i.e., in the form of so-called tripwires that ultimately span an attack graph, which assists attack reconstruction algorithms. This paper proposes an idea for a framework that combines cyber deception, automatic tripwire injection and attack graphs, which eventually enables us to reconstruct multi-step cyber attacks in modern cloud environments.