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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 EKS
  • 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 kubeconfig file:
  2. If the permissions are more permissive than 644 (e.g., 664, 666, 600 is fine), set them to 644:
  3. Confirm the file is owned by the appropriate user and group (typically root:root). If needed, correct it:
  4. Re-verify that the permissions are now 644 or more restrictive:
kubectl cannot modify file permissions on worker node hosts, including /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf. This finding must be remediated directly on each worker node’s filesystem (host-level configuration); follow the Manual Steps section on those nodes to apply the fix.

Additional Reading: