More Info:
Enable kubelet client certificate rotation.Risk Level
LowAddress
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, back up the kubelet config before editing:
-
On every worker node, edit the kubelet config file and ensure
rotateCertificatesis not set tofalse(either set it totrueor remove the line completely). For example, to force it totrue:Then open the file to confirm:and, if needed, manually add:under the appropriate kubelet config section. -
If the kubelet is also configured via systemd flags, on every worker node check for an explicit
--rotate-certificates=falseargument:If found (commonly in/etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf), edit the file and remove the--rotate-certificates=falseflag from theKUBELET_CERTIFICATE_ARGS(or similar) line:Save the file after removing just that flag. -
On every worker node, reload systemd configuration and restart kubelet:
-
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=falseargument present, and - if a
--rotate-certificatesflag is present, it is not set tofalse.
- there is no
Using kubectl
Using kubectl
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.Automation
Automation

