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Do not use self-signed certificates for TLS.

Risk Level

High

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

  • CIS Kubernetes

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

Manual Steps

  1. On every etcd (control plane) node, back up the current etcd static pod manifest:
  2. Open /etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd.yaml for editing:
  3. In the container command/args list for etcd, locate any --auto-tls flag and either:
    • remove the entire --auto-tls=... entry, or
    • change it explicitly to false, for example:
  4. Save the file and exit the editor. The kubelet will automatically restart the etcd static pod when it detects the manifest change (this temporarily restarts etcd on this node).
  5. After 30–60 seconds, verify on the same node that etcd is running without --auto-tls=true:
  6. Inspect the output and confirm there is no --auto-tls=true argument present in the etcd process command line (and, if present, it is --auto-tls=false or absent entirely). Repeat these steps on every etcd node.
kubectl cannot change the etcd process flags or the static pod manifest at /etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd.yaml on the control plane node. To remediate this finding, you must edit that file directly on every etcd node; see the Manual Steps section.

Additional Reading: