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Enable kubelet client certificate rotation.

Risk Level

Low

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, back up the current kubelet configuration and systemd drop-in:
  1. On every worker node, edit the kubelet config file to enable certificate rotation:
Ensure there is a line setting rotateCertificates: true (add or update as needed), for example:
  1. On every worker node, ensure no systemd argument disables rotation:
  • Remove any occurrence of --rotate-certificates=false.
  • If you must use flags instead of config, make sure KUBELET_ARGS (or the ExecStart line) includes --rotate-certificates=true and not false.
  1. On every worker node, reload systemd and restart kubelet (this will briefly disrupt pods scheduled on that node):
  1. On every worker node, verify the kubelet process is running with certificate rotation enabled and not disabled:
Confirm the output does not contain --rotate-certificates=false; if the flag appears, it should be --rotate-certificates=true, or the flag can be absent while rotateCertificates: true is set in /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml.
kubectl cannot modify kubelet process flags or its on-node configuration file /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml, so this finding cannot be fixed via the Kubernetes API. Make the changes directly on every worker node’s host configuration and systemd unit as described in the Manual Steps section.

Additional Reading: