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When makeIPTablesUtilChains is true, the kubelet manages the iptables utility chains needed for correct pod networking and traffic filtering on the node.

Risk Level

Medium

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

  • CIS EKS

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

Manual Steps

  1. On every worker node, open the kubelet config file and set makeIPTablesUtilChains to true:
    If your environment instead uses /etc/kubernetes/kubelet/kubelet-config.json, edit that file:
  2. On every worker node, ensure the systemd drop-in does not override this setting:
  3. On every worker node, reload systemd and restart kubelet (this restarts the kubelet and may briefly disrupt workloads on that node):
  4. From any machine with kubectl access, optionally verify the live kubelet config via the configz endpoint for a given worker node:
  5. On every worker node, confirm the running kubelet process is not passing a conflicting --make-iptables-util-chains flag:
    Ensure the command line either omits --make-iptables-util-chains (so the config file value is used) or, if present, has it set to true.
kubectl cannot modify the kubelet’s host-level configuration or process flags, including makeIPTablesUtilChains. This finding must be remediated directly on each worker node by editing the kubelet config and/or systemd unit files as described in the Manual Steps section.