All-Things-Docker-and-Kubernetes

Use Audit Logs to monitor access

Auditing

Kubernetes provides auditing and it is handled by the kube-apiserver. However, we will still need to enable it.

Flow of Request

  1. Request is sent to kube-apiserver.
  2. It goes through RequestReceived stage. In this stage, events are generated regardless if requests are approved or not.
  3. For requests that take some time to complete, they go through RequestStarted.
  4. Once request is completed, it goes through RequestComplete. In this stage, a response body is returned.
  5. For invalid requests or errors, the request goes through Panic stage.

If we record all events generated for every stage, we would end up with thousands of logs within no time. TO record specific events, we can create a Policy object.

Enable Auditing on the Kubernetes

We can use a Policy object which will contain all our rules for the kube-apiserver to use and record events that match the condition.

## /etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml 

apiVersion: audit.k8s.io/v1
kind: Policy
omitStages: ["RequestReceived"]
metadata:
  name: sample-policy
rules:
  - namespaces: ["prod-namespace"]
    verb: ["delete"]               
    resources: 
    - groups: "" 
      resources: ["pods"]
      resourceNames: ["webapp-pod"]
    level: RequestResponse   

  - level: Metadata 
    resources:
    - groups: "" 
      resources: ["secrets"]

Levels:

To enable auditing, we need to specify the audit file and the policy file in the kube-apiserver manifest.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: kube-apiserver
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  containers:
  - name: kube-apiserver
    image: k8s.gcr.io/kube-apiserver:v1.21.3
    command:
    - kube-apiserver
    - --advertise-address=0.0.0.0
    - --allow-privileged=true
    - --authorization-mode=Node,RBAC
    ......
    - --audit-log-path=/var/;pg/k8s-audit.log
    - --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml
    - --audit-log-maxage=10 
    - --audit-log-maxbackup=5 
    - --audit-log-maxsize=100

If the kube-apiserver is deployed as a service, specify the files in the service unit file:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/kube-apiserver 
  --advertise-address=0.0.0.0 
  -allow-privileged=true 
  --authorization-mode=Node,RBAC 
  ......
  --audit-log-path=/var/;pg/k8s-audit.log
  --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml 
  --audit-log-maxage=10  
  --audit-log-maxbackup=5  
  --audit-log-maxsize=100


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