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Ensure that the kubelet.conf file has permissions of 644 or more restrictive

Risk Level

Medium

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 the current permissions of the kubelet configuration file:
  2. On every worker node, set the file permissions to 644 as required:
  3. (Optional, on every worker node) Confirm file ownership is appropriate for your environment (commonly root:root):
  4. On every worker node, verify the permissions are now compliant:
kubectl cannot modify file permissions on node-local paths such as /etc/kubernetes/kubelet-config.yaml; this must be fixed directly on every worker node via host-level access (for example, SSH). Refer to the Manual Steps section for the exact commands to run on each node.
Usage:
  • Copy this script to a file, for example /usr/local/sbin/fix-cis-gke-3.1.3.sh.
  • Run on every worker node as root:

Additional Reading: