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Context: Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto tool for automated container orchestration. Business and government organizations are increasingly adopting Kubernetes for automated software deployments. Kubernetes is being used to provision applications in a wide range of domains, such as time series forecasting, edge computing, and high performance computing. Due to such a pervasive presence, Kubernetes-related security misconfigurations can cause large-scale security breaches. Thus, a systematic analysis of security misconfigurations in Kubernetes manifests, i.e., configuration files used for Kubernetes, can help practitioners secure their Kubernetes clusters. Objective: The goal of this paper is to help practitioners secure their Kubernetes clusters by identifying security misconfigurations that occur in Kubernetes manifests . Methodology: We conduct an empirical study with 2,039 Kubernetes manifests mined from 92 open-source software repositories to systematically characterize security misconfigurations in Kubernetes manifests. We also construct a static analysis tool called Security Linter for Kubernetes Manifests (SLI-KUBE) to quantify the frequency of the identified security misconfigurations. Results: In all, we identify 11 categories of security misconfigurations, such as absent resource limit, absent securityContext, and activation of hostIPC. Specifically, we identify 1,051 security misconfigurations in 2,039 manifests. We also observe the identified security misconfigurations affect entities that perform mesh-related load balancing, as well as provision pods and stateful applications. Furthermore, practitioners agreed to fix 60% of 10 misconfigurations reported by us. Conclusion: Our empirical study shows Kubernetes manifests to include security misconfigurations, which necessitates security-focused code reviews and application of static analysis when Kubernetes manifests are developed. 

Despite yielding benefits for organizations, infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts are susceptible to security weaknesses, such as hard-coded passwords. Existence of such security weaknesses necessitate integration of education materials related to secure development of IaC scripts. In this preliminary work, we describe our experiences of how application of authentic learning helped students learn about secure development of IaC scripts. Our paper shows education materials based on authentic learning to help students learn about secure IaC development. 

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, industry practitioners are moving towards container-based infrastructure for managing their digital workloads. Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool, is reported to help industry practitioners in automated management of cloud infrastructure and rapid deployment of software services. Despite reported benefits, Kubernetes installations are susceptible to security defects, as it occurred for Tesla in 2018. Understanding how frequently security defects appear in Kubernetes installations can help cybersecurity researchers to investigate security-related vulnerabilities for Kubernetes and generate security best practices to avoid them. In this position paper, we first quantify how frequently security defects appear in Kubernetes manifests, i.e., configuration files that are use to install and manage Kubernetes. Next, we lay out a list of future research directions that researchers can pursue.We apply qualitative analysis on 5,193 commits collected from 38 open source repositories and observe that 0.79% of the 5,193 commits are security-related. Based on our findings, we posit that security-related defects are under-reported and advocate for rigorous research that can systematically identify undiscovered security defects that exist in Kubernetes manifests. We predict that the increasing use of Kubernetes with unresolved security defects can lead to large-scale security breaches.