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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 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

Manual Steps

  1. On every worker node, back up the kubelet config before editing:
  2. On every worker node, edit the kubelet config file and ensure rotateCertificates is not set to false (either set it to true or remove the line completely). For example, to force it to true:
    Then open the file to confirm:
    and, if needed, manually add:
    under the appropriate kubelet config section.
  3. If the kubelet is also configured via systemd flags, on every worker node check for an explicit --rotate-certificates=false argument:
    If found (commonly in /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf), edit the file and remove the --rotate-certificates=false flag from the KUBELET_CERTIFICATE_ARGS (or similar) line:
    Save the file after removing just that flag.
  4. On every worker node, reload systemd configuration and restart kubelet:
  5. On every worker node, verify via the process list that kubelet is not running with --rotate-certificates=false:
    Inspect the output and confirm that:
    • there is no --rotate-certificates=false argument present, and
    • if a --rotate-certificates flag is present, it is not set to false.
kubectl cannot modify kubelet host-level configuration such as /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml or systemd units on worker nodes. To remediate this finding, make the changes directly on each worker node as described in the Manual Steps section.

Additional Reading: