A security issue assigned CVE-2020-8558 was recently discovered in the kube-proxy, a networking component running on Kubernetes nodes. The issue exposed internal services of Kubernetes nodes, often run without authentication. On certain Kubernetes deployments, this could have exposed the api-server, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to gain complete control over the cluster. An attacker with this sort of access could steal information, deploy crypto miners or remove existing services altogether.
The vulnerability exposed nodes’ localhost services – services meant to be accessible only from the node itself – to hosts on the local network and to pods running on the node. Localhost bound services expect that only trusted, local processes can interact with them, and thus often serve requests without authentication. If your nodes run localhost services without enforcing authentication, you are affected.
The issue details were made public on April 18, 2020, and a patch released on June 1, 2020. We worked to assess additional impact to Kubernetes clusters and found that some Kubernetes installations don’t disable the api-server insecure-port, which is normally only accessible from within the master node. Exploiting CVE-2020-8558, attackers can gain access to the insecure-port and gain full control over the cluster.
We alerted the Kubernetes security team of the potential impact of this vulnerability. In turn, the team rated the vulnerability’s impact as High in clusters where the api-server insecure-port is enabled, and otherwise Medium. Luckily, CVE-2020-8558’s impact is somewhat reduced on most hosted Kubernetes services like AKS, Amazon’s Elastic KubernetesService (EKS) and Google KubernetesEngine (GKE). CVE-2020-8558 was patched in Kubernetesversions v1.18.4, v1.17.7, and v1.16.11 (released June 17, 2020). All users are encouraged to update.
