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Ensure that the kubelet.conf file ownership is set to root:root.

Risk Level

Low

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

  • APRA CPS 234 (Australia)
  • BSI C5 (Germany)
  • Brazil LGPD
  • CCPA / CPRA (California)
  • CIS Critical Security Controls v8
  • CIS GKE
  • 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)
  • NIS2 Directive
  • 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

Manual Steps

  1. On every worker node, check current ownership of the kubelet configuration file:
  2. On every worker node, change the file owner and group to root:
  3. (Optional, if you want to enforce permissions as well) On every worker node, restrict the file permissions:
  4. On every worker node, verify the ownership is now correct:
    The output must be:
kubectl cannot modify host-level file ownership for /etc/kubernetes/kubelet-config.yaml on worker nodes. This must be fixed directly on each node’s OS (over SSH or similar) by adjusting file ownership; see the Manual Steps section for the exact commands.

Additional Reading: