Platform Engineering

A Kubernetes Secret is not actually secret. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, especially if you’ve been dutifully creating Secret objects and patting yourself on the back for not hardcoding credentials in your ConfigMap. The problem runs deeper than most teams realize, and it doesn’t get fixed by following the basic Kubernetes documentation. This post is about what actually works, at different scales, with honest tradeoffs for each approach. ...

It started with a misconfigured CI runner. A developer had a Jenkins pipeline building Docker images. The container ran as root. A dependency had a known RCE vulnerability. When the exploit landed, the attacker had root inside the container, and because that process was root, they also had root on the host. They pivoted to the secrets store, grabbed credentials, and spent three weeks inside the network before anyone noticed. ...