More Info:
Ensure that the kubelet.conf file has permissions of 644 or more restrictiveRisk Level
MediumAddress
SecurityCompliance Standards
- APRA CPS 234 (Australia)
- BSI C5 (Germany)
- Brazil LGPD
- CCPA / CPRA (California)
- CIS Critical Security Controls v8
- CIS GKE
- 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
Remediation
Manual Steps
Manual Steps
-
On every worker node, check the current permissions of the kubelet configuration file:
-
On every worker node, set the file permissions to 644 as required:
-
(Optional, on every worker node) Confirm file ownership is appropriate for your environment (commonly root:root):
-
On every worker node, verify the permissions are now compliant:
Using kubectl
Using kubectl
kubectl cannot modify file permissions on node-local paths such as
/etc/kubernetes/kubelet-config.yaml; this must be fixed directly on every worker node via host-level access (for example, SSH). Refer to the Manual Steps section for the exact commands to run on each node.Automation
Automation
- Copy this script to a file, for example
/usr/local/sbin/fix-cis-gke-3.1.3.sh. - Run on every worker node as root:

