Keeping up to date with critical vulnerabilities related to Kubernetes can be challenging for a variety of reasons. The biggest one may be related to Kubernetes itself; it’s a complex and rapidly evolving platform, with regular updates and new features being introduced regularly (not to mention updates to APIs and add-ons). Kubernetes environments are scalable and dynamic, so sometimes vulnerabilities can have a wide-ranging impact. Staying informed about the latest vulnerabilities impacting the Kubernetes ecosystem can be difficult, in part because of the diverse attack surface K8s presents.
Vulnerability management is an ongoing process that involves multiple steps. Kubernetes security itself is a complex topic, so let’s focus on the process for managing Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). First and foremost, you need to monitor the CVE database and relevant vendor announcements (for example, here’s a list of the nginx security advisories) for new vulnerabilities and use automated vulnerability scanning tools to identify CVEs in your images, systems, and applications. You’ll also need to maintain an up-to-date inventory of all assets in your environment. (Otherwise, how would you know that you were at risk from a vulnerability in a commonly used open source project?)
You’ll also need to evaluate the CVEs based on their Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which measures the severity of the vulnerability based on the Base, Threat, Environmental, and Supplemental metric groups. The higher the score, the greater the severity, but that’s not the same as risk. To evaluate risk, you’ll need to prioritize CVEs by considering how they could potentially impact your organization’s critical business assets and processes. Then, you’d need to plan how (and in what order) to patch or remediate those CVEs, testing patches in controlled environments before deploying them to a production system. Sometimes, patching may take a long time to roll out, in which case you may need to consider mitigation strategies. Identifying, prioritizing, and patching or mitigating CVEs in a timely manner can help you minimize risk and ensure business continuity.
Kubernetes is a complex environment, and it has its own official CVE feed you can reference, which is maintained by the community based on official CVEs announced by the Kubernetes Security Response Committee. It’s important to remember, however, that this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the CVEs that might impact your K8s infrastructure. In this post, we walk through the top five CVEs that we remediated for our clients to ensure their infrastructure remained secure and available in 2024.
First disclosed on January 31, 2024, CVE-2024-21626 was last modified on November 21, 2024 and reported by GitHub, Inc. The base score for this CVE is 8.6, making it a high severity vulnerability.
First disclosed on March 29, 2024, CVE-2024-3094 was last modified on November 21, 2024 and reported by Red Hat, Inc. The base score for this CVE is 10.0, making it a critical severity vulnerability. It’s relatively rare to have 10.0 vulnerabilities, which represent the most severe security issues, typically involving full compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. These vulnerabilities demand immediate attention and remediation due to their critical impact.
First disclosed on May 21, 2024, CVE-2024-31989 was last modified on November 21, 2024 and reported by GitHub, Inc. The base score for this CVE is 9.0, making it a critical severity vulnerability.
First disclosed on July 1, 2024, CVE-2024-6387 was last modified on November 21, 2024 and reported by Red Hat, Inc. The base score for this CVE is 8.1, making it a high severity vulnerability.
First disclosed on August 16, 2024, CVE-2024-7646 was last modified on November 21, 2024 and reported by Kubernetes. The base score for this CVE is 8.8, making it a high severity vulnerability.
Staying on top of high and critical Kubernetes CVEs is critical for maintaining a secure and compliant infrastructure and preventing malicious actors from compromising your environment. However, staying on top of these vulnerabilities can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service makes it simple for our customers and clients to relax, because we constantly monitor for high and critical vulnerabilities impacting Kubernetes, ensuring these CVEs are patched without disrupting your teams or business workflows.
Fairwinds’ proactive approach improves your security posture and allows your team to focus on innovation rather than constantly tracking new CVEs and determining how best to address them. By rapidly identifying CVEs and remediating them, our clients canrest assured that even critical vulnerabilities will be handled quickly. Have you patched these top five Kubernetes CVEs? If you need help managing your Kubernetes infrastructure, reach out to learn how FairwindsManaged Kubernetes-as-a-Service can help.
