More Info:
Enable kubelet server certificate rotation.Risk Level
LowAddress
SecurityCompliance Standards
- APRA CPS 234 (Australia)
- BSI C5 (Germany)
- Brazil LGPD
- CCPA / CPRA (California)
- CIS Critical Security Controls v8
- CIS EKS
- CMMC 2.0
- CSA Cloud Controls Matrix v4
- DPDPA
- Digital Operational Resilience Act (EU)
- Essential 8
- ISO/IEC 27017
- ISO/IEC 27018
- ISO/IEC 27701
- KSA PDPL
- MAS Technology Risk Management (Singapore)
- MITRE ATT&CK (Cloud)
- NIST SP 800-171
- NYDFS 23 NYCRR 500
- SWIFT Customer Security Controls Framework
- Sarbanes-Oxley IT General Controls
- UK NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework
Triage and Remediation
- Remediation
Remediation
Manual Steps
Manual Steps
-
On every worker node, open the kubelet config file and enable the feature gate:
-
On every worker node, ensure no conflicting flag is set in the systemd drop-in; remove any existing
--rotate-kubelet-server-certificatesetting: -
(Optional alternative to step 1 if you prefer flags instead of config file; still on every worker node) Append the flag to the kubelet args line:
-
On every worker node, reload systemd and restart kubelet (this restarts the kubelet process, affecting node registration/Pods briefly):
-
On any machine with kubectl access, verify kubelet config via the configz endpoint for each worker node (replace NODE_NAME with each node’s name from
kubectl get nodes): -
On every worker node, confirm the running kubelet process includes the correct setting and no
falseoverride:Inspect the output to ensure either:- no
--rotate-kubelet-server-certificateflag is present (so the config file controls it and configz showsRotateKubeletServerCertificate:true), or - if present, it is
--rotate-kubelet-server-certificate=trueand notfalse.
- no
Using kubectl
Using kubectl
kubectl cannot be used to enable
RotateKubeletServerCertificate because this setting is applied via kubelet host-level configuration on each worker node (for example /etc/kubernetes/kubelet/kubelet-config.json, /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml, and the systemd unit drop-in). Make the changes directly on every worker node as described in the Manual Steps section and then restart the kubelet service.Automation
Automation

