Apply Security Context to Your Pods and Containers (CIS 5.6.3)

Impact & Risk Analysis

Severity: Medium (Level 2 - Defense in Depth)
CIS Benchmark: CIS 5.6.3
Impact: Insecure Defaults. A security context defines privilege and access control settings for a Pod or Container. Without an explicit security context, Kubernetes relies on the container runtime’s defaults, which often include running as root, having unnecessary Linux capabilities, and allowing write access to the root filesystem. This significantly increases the attack surface if the application is compromised.

Common Misconfiguration

Omitting the securityContext section entirely in Deployment or Pod manifests. This is the most common default state for new deployments, leaving the application running with permissions it likely does not need.

Vulnerable Example

# Vulnerable Pod Spec
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: insecure-pod
spec:
  # VULNERABLE: No Pod-level security context
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: nginx
    # VULNERABLE: No Container-level security context
    # Result: Runs as root, with writable root FS, and default capabilities.

Secure Example

# Secure Pod Spec
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: secure-pod
spec:
  # 1. Pod-Level Context (Applies to all containers)
  securityContext:
    runAsUser: 1000
    runAsGroup: 3000
    runAsNonRoot: true
    fsGroup: 2000
    seccompProfile:
      type: RuntimeDefault
      
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: nginx
    # 2. Container-Level Context (Overrides/Supplements Pod level)
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
      readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
      capabilities:
        drop:
          - ALL

Audit Procedure

Review the pod definitions in your cluster and verify that security contexts are defined. You can use this command to find pods that lack a security context entirely or have specific missing fields.

# Check for pods with missing security contexts
kubectl get pods -A -o=jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}: {.spec.securityContext} {.spec.containers[*].securityContext}{"\n"}{end}'

Analyze: Look for empty brackets {} or missing critical fields like runAsNonRoot or capabilities.
Fail: If the output indicates null or empty configurations for user workloads.

Remediation

Apply a robust securityContext to all your Pods and Containers.

Pod Level: Set runAsNonRoot, runAsUser, and fsGroup to ensure identity isolation.
Container Level: Set readOnlyRootFilesystem, allowPrivilegeEscalation: false, and drop ALL capabilities to harden the runtime environment.

Getting Started

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Vulnerability Reference

Security & Trust

User Management

Apply Security Context to Your Pods and Containers (CIS 5.6.3)

Impact & Risk Analysis

Common Misconfiguration

Vulnerable Example

Secure Example

Audit Procedure

Remediation

​Impact & Risk Analysis

​Common Misconfiguration

​Vulnerable Example

​Secure Example

​Audit Procedure

​Remediation

Impact & Risk Analysis

Common Misconfiguration

Vulnerable Example

Secure Example

Audit Procedure

Remediation