Mitigating Kubernetes Misconfigurations: How To Secure Your Deployments

Almost any developer looking to leverage containers turns to Kubernetes (K8s) for orchestration. However, with its complexity comes security risks, particularly misconfigurations, which remain one of the most critical attack vectors in cloud-native environments. In effect, K8s misconfigurations can lead to data breaches, privilege escalations and service disruptions. 

This blog examines key technical security challenges associated with K8s and demonstrates how to mitigate these risks through platform engineering. 

The Current Status of Kubernetes 

The vast majority of software developers, architects and other IT professionals are using application containers, with a 2023 report from DZone estimating 88% of software experts utilizing the technology in either development or production environments. All these containers are primarily managed through two tools: Docker and K8s. In particular, 80% of DZone survey respondents said that their organization is running K8s clusters.  

Despite the broad adoption of container and K8s, development teams continue to struggle with some aspects of these technologies. More precisely, many experts struggle with setting up, configuring and managing K8s. As such, these tasks are typically extremely time consuming, resource intensive and present a high risk of misconfiguration.  

Key Security Challenges in Kubernetes Deployments 

While K8s is extremely valuable and can deliver high flexibility, its inherent configuration complexities can be overwhelming while leading to potential security vulnerabilities. K8s configuration errors can create vulnerabilities that malicious actors exploit. In a multi-tenant environment, where multiple customers share the same K8s cluster, the risks associated with misconfigurations are particularly high.  

Studies show that nearly 90% of practitioners have encountered K8s-related security incidents in 2023, with misconfigurations accounting for at least 40% of such issues.  Alarmingly, companies of all sizes have fallen victim to cyberattacks made possible by improperly configured K8s, from car manufacturers to renowned IT firms.  

Payara Cloud: Security Through Automation & Pre-Configured Setups 

While managing K8s configurations can be overwhelming, especially when trying to balance flexibility and security in a multi-tenant environment, there are solutions to help overcome these issues. In particular, platform engineering can be a crucial ally. Rather than burdening development teams with the complexity of Kubernetes and infrastructure management, development team managers can rely on a comprehensive application platform that offers a pre-configured framework to simplify, streamline and support developers in K8s-related activities. 

Payara Cloud simplifies infrastructure management by automating K8s, Docker, routing and certificate configurations. Besides being able to accelerate development workflows correctly, the automations within the PaaS help reduce the risk of errors associated with K8s misconfigurations. In addition, Payara Cloud addresses common K8s security challenges by embedding secure defaults and regular updates into its runtime environment.  

When it comes to securing applications and data from others in a shared cluster, users benefit from Payara Cloud’s opinionated and secure-by-default infrastructure design, including: 

1. Built-in Security Contexts

Applications are deployed in isolated containers, with automatic SecurityContext constraints applied to limit their privileges. This restricts access to sensitive kernel features, filesystem paths and host resources, reducing the impact if an application is compromised. 

These hardened environments prevent unauthorized access to system components and enforce the principle of least privilege by default, helping guard against container escapes and privilege escalation attempts. 

2. Namespace-Level Segmentation

Payara Cloud assigns each application deployment to its own Kubernetes namespace, which acts as a logical boundary. 

Network policies are automatically applied to: 

• Allow traffic only within the application’s own namespace, supporting microservice interaction. 

• Block all cross-namespace traffic by default, so applications can’t “see” or interact with workloads that belong to other customers. 

This prevents an app from executing unauthorized commands or scanning the internal network for other services. If one customer’s app is compromised, the blast radius is limited to their own namespace. 

3. Automated Certificate Management

Security isn’t just about keeping other tenants out, it should also protect your users and data during transit. Payara Cloud integrates automatic SSL/TLS certificate management. This eliminates certificate rotation, one of the most error-prone aspects of cloud app deployment, while ensuring data is always encrypted in transit. 

Why Platform-Level Protections Matter 

K8s offers a high degree of control and customization. As such, security missteps can happen fast and have wide-reaching consequences, with even small oversights in configuration having the potential to become attack vectors. 

Payara Cloud’s approach can help you overcome these challenges by incorporating protections at the platform level, including: 

• Enforced CPU and memory limits to prevent noisy neighbor issues. 

• Network isolation to prevent lateral movement in multi-tenant environments. 

• SSL/TLS everywhere, by default. 

• Read-only containers and least-privilege execution environments. 

By managing all of this automatically, Payara Cloud provides a secure baseline that minimizes the risk of user error and, in turn, cloud-native breaches. 

Final Thoughts: Preventing K8s Misconfigurations Before They Happen 

The power and flexibility that K8s offers comes at a cost: configuration complexity and the potential for dangerous security missteps. In effect, misconfigurations remain one of the leading causes of vulnerabilities in containerized environments, especially in a multi-tenant cloud environment. While sharing infrastructure brings huge efficiency and cost benefits, it can also lead to unwanted breaches. Thus, proper K8s setup to ensure airtight isolation between tenants is a must. 

A fully managed platform like Payara Cloud can help overcome these challenges by providing a secure-by-design PaaS that automates the hard parts of K8s. Payara Cloud’s managed runtime approach demonstrates how application platform-level abstractions can mitigate the ‘Achilles' heel’ of K8s misconfigurations without sacrificing deployment flexibility, cost and speed. 

Explore first-hand Payara Cloud’s security features by signing up for a free trial.