Enumeration from a Pod

In a situation where you have managed to break into a Kubernetes Pod you could start enumerating the kubernetes environment from within.

Service Account Tokens

Before continuing, if you don't know what is a service in Kubernetes I would suggest you to follow this link and read at least the information about Kubernetes architecture.

ServiceAccount is an object managed by Kubernetes and used to provide an identity for processes that run in a pod. Every service account has a secret related to it and this secret contains a bearer token. This is a JSON Web Token (JWT), a method for representing claims securely between two parties.

Usually in the directory /run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount or /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount you can find the files:

  • ca.crt: It's the ca certificate to check kubernetes communications

  • namespace: It indicates the current namespace

  • token: It contains the service token of the current pod.

The service account token is being signed by the key residing in the file sa.key and validated by sa.pub.

Default location on Kubernetes:

  • /etc/kubernetes/pki

Default location on Minikube:

  • /var/lib/localkube/certs

Taken from the Kubernetes documentation:

“When you create a pod, if you do not specify a service account, it is automatically assigned the default service account in the same namespace.”

Hot Pods

Hot pods are pods containing a privileged service account token. A privileged service account token is a token that has permission to do privileged tasks such as listing secrets, creating pods, etc.

RBAC

If you don't know what is RBAC, read this section.

Enumeration CheatSheet

To enumerate the environment you can upload the kubectl binary and use it. Also, using the service token obtained before you can manually access some endpoints of the API Server. In order to find the the IP of the API service check the environment for a variable called KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST.

Differences between list and get verbs

With get permissions you can access the API:

If you have the list permission, you are allowed to execute these API requests:

If you have the watch permission, you are allowed to execute these API requests:

They open a streaming connection that returns you the full manifest of a Deployment whenever it changes (or when a new one is created).

Get namespaces

Get secrets

If you can read secrets you can use the following lines to get the privileges related to each to token:

Get Current Privileges

Once you know which privileges you have, check the following page to figure out if you can abuse them to escalate privileges:

Hardening Roles/ClusterRoles

Get Current Context

Get deployments

Get pods

Get services

Get nodes

Get daemonsets

Get "all"

Pod Breakout

If you are lucky enough you may be able to escape from it to the node:

Docker Breakout

Sniffing

By default there isn't any encryption in the communication between pods .Mutual authentication, two-way, pod to pod.

Create a sidecar proxy app

Create your .yaml

Edit your .yaml and add the uncomment lines:

See the logs of the proxy:

More info at: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context/

Search vulnerable network services

As you are inside the Kubernetes environment, if you cannot escalate privileges abusing the current pods privileges and you cannot escape from the container, you should search potential vulnerable services.

Services

For this purpose, you can try to get all the services of the kubernetes environment:

Scanning

The following Bash script (taken from a Kubernetes workshop) will install and scan the IP ranges of the kubernetes cluster:

References

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