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Allow Kubelet to manage iptables.

Risk Level

High

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)
  • 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 how kubelet is configured and whether the flag is already set:
  1. If using the kubelet config file (preferred), edit /etc/kubernetes/kubelet/kubelet-config.json on every worker node to set makeIPTablesUtilChains to true (create or update the field in the top-level config object):
Add or change the line so it reads (with a trailing comma if required by surrounding JSON):
  1. Ensure the systemd drop-in does not override this flag; on every worker node, remove any --make-iptables-util-chains argument from the kubelet args file:
  1. If instead you are using only executable arguments (no kubelet config file), edit the kubelet args file on every worker node to explicitly set the flag:
In the line defining KUBELET_ARGS=... (or equivalent), ensure it includes:
and save the file.
  1. On every worker node, reload systemd and restart kubelet so the change takes effect (this will restart the kubelet process):
  1. Verify on every worker node that kubelet is now running with --make-iptables-util-chains=true or that the config file contains "makeIPTablesUtilChains": true:
kubectl cannot change the kubelet’s --make-iptables-util-chains setting because it is a host-level configuration controlled by files and systemd units on every worker node (for example /etc/kubernetes/kubelet/kubelet-config.json or /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubelet-args.conf). To remediate this finding, follow the guidance in the Manual Steps section on each worker node.

Additional Reading: