Securing Kubernetes Ingress resources is crucial to protect your applications and data from unauthorized access, attacks, and other security risks.
Ingress Controller Best Practices:
- Use HTTPS/TLS Encryption
- TLS Termination: Configure your Ingress to terminate TLS (HTTPS) connections at the Ingress controller. This ensures that traffic between clients and the Ingress is encrypted.
- Certificates: Use trusted SSL/TLS certificates from a reputable Certificate Authority (CA) to secure your domains. Consider using a certificate manager to automate this process.
- Secret Management: Store TLS certificates securely in Kubernetes Secrets and reference them in your Ingress configuration.
- Authentication: make sure the client application has authenticated any users before accessing any resources via the gateway.
- Authorization: define access control rules to restrict access to specific paths or services based on user roles or groups.
- Identity of the system that is calling so you can authorize the request based on the client application identity using client certificate, JWT Token, or Basic Auth (or in combination).
- Make sure the subject (human or machine) is authorized to access the resource they are trying to access.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- WAF Integration: Consider deploying a WAF as part of your Ingress Gateway to protect against common web application vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS attacks, and other malicious payloads.
- Rule Configuration: Configure WAF rulesets to block suspicious requests and enforce security policies at the edge of your network.
- Rate Limiting and DDoS Protection
- Rate Limiting: Implement rate limiting to prevent abuse and ensure fair resource allocation among clients accessing your services.
- DDoS Mitigation: Use Ingress controllers or external services that provide DDoS protection mechanisms to defend against large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
- Logging and Monitoring
- Logging: Enable logging for your Ingress resources to capture access logs, errors, and other relevant information. Store logs securely and analyze them to detect anomalies or potential security incidents.
- Monitoring: Monitor the performance and health of your Ingress controllers to detect and respond to security incidents promptly.
- Least Privilege Principle
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Implement RBAC to enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that only authorized entities have access to modify or interact with Ingress resources.
- Namespace Isolation: Use Kubernetes namespaces to isolate applications and resources, limiting the impact of potential security breaches.
- Secure Configuration Management
- Secure Secrets Management: Ensure that sensitive information such as TLS certificates, API keys, and passwords are managed securely using Kubernetes Secrets or external secret management solutions.
- Configuration Auditing: Regularly audit and review the configuration of your Ingress resources to identify and remediate misconfigurations or security gaps.
To learn more about how to use Tetrate to secure your kubernetes ingress, read more here.