cis-gke-v180-5-10-3

name	cis-gke-v180-5.10.3
description	Consider GKE Sandbox for running untrusted workloads (Automated)
category	cis-gke
version	1.8.0
author	cyberstrike-official
tags	["cis","gke","kubernetes","gcp","other-cluster-config","web-ui","dashboard","alpha-clusters","gke-sandbox","security-posture"]
cis_id	5.10.3
cis_benchmark	CIS Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Benchmark v1.8.0
tech_stack	["kubernetes","gcp","gke"]
cwe_ids	[]
chains_with	[]
prerequisites	[]
severity_boost	{}

5.10.3 Consider GKE Sandbox for running untrusted workloads (Automated)

Profile Applicability

• Level 2

Description

Use GKE Sandbox to restrict untrusted workloads as an additional layer of protection when running in a multi-tenant environment.

Rationale

GKE Sandbox provides an extra layer of security to prevent untrusted code from affecting the host kernel on your cluster nodes.

When you enable GKE Sandbox on a Node pool, a sandbox is created for each Pod running on a node in that Node pool. In addition, nodes running sandboxed Pods are prevented from accessing other GCP services or cluster metadata. Each sandbox uses its own userspace kernel.

Multi-tenant clusters and clusters whose containers run untrusted workloads are more exposed to security vulnerabilities than other clusters. Examples include SaaS providers, web-hosting providers, or other organizations that allow their users to upload and run code. A flaw in the container runtime or in the host kernel could allow a process running within a container to 'escape' the container and affect the node's kernel, potentially bringing down the node.

The potential also exists for a malicious tenant to gain access to and exfiltrate another tenant's data in memory or on disk, by exploiting such a defect.

Impact

Using GKE Sandbox requires the node image to be set to Container-Optimized OS with containerd (cos_containerd).

It is not currently possible to use GKE Sandbox along with the following Kubernetes features:

• Accelerators such as GPUs or TPUs
• Istio
• Monitoring statistics at the level of the Pod or container
• Hostpath storage
• Per-container PID namespace
• CPU and memory limits are only applied for Guaranteed Pods and Burstable Pods, and only when CPU and memory limits are specified for all containers running in the Pod
• Pods using PodSecurityPolicies that specify host namespaces, such as hostNetwork, hostPID, or hostIPC
• Pods using PodSecurityPolicy settings such as privileged mode
• VolumeDevices
• Portforward
• Linux kernel security modules such as Seccomp, Apparmor, or Selinux Sysctl, NoNewPrivileges, bidirectional MountPropagation, FSGroup, or ProcMount

Audit

Using Google Cloud Console:

1. Go to Kubernetes Engine by visiting: https://console.cloud.google.com/kubernetes/list.
2. Click on each cluster, and click on any Node pools that are not provisioned by default.
3. On the Node pool Details page, under the Security heading on the Node pool details page, check that is set to 'Enabled'.