rbac
Safeguard articles tagged "rbac" — guides, analysis, and best practices for software supply chain and application security.
28 articles
The Kubernetes Token Nobody Asked For
Every pod gets a token that authenticates to the API server, whether the application inside it ever calls the API or not. It sits there anyway, readable by anything that can read a file in the container, because the default is on.
Permission Models Are Not Designed, They Accumulate
An is_admin boolean, then a role column, then a special case for one customer. Three years later nobody can say what a given user can do without reading the code, and an auditor is asking.
A Practical Kubernetes Operator Security Checklist
Kubernetes operators run with broad cluster access. This checklist covers the controls that matter most in 2025, from RBAC scoping to image provenance.
RBAC vs. ABAC vs. ReBAC: choosing an access-control model for multi-tenant cloud apps
Google's Zanzibar paper (USENIX ATC 2019) showed relationship graphs authorizing access with sub-10ms latency at massive scale — here's when RBAC or ABAC beats it instead.
TLS termination and cert-manager: a hardening guide for Kubernetes Ingress
IngressNightmare's CVSS 9.8 RCE showed that ingress-nginx's own admission webhook can be turned against cluster Secrets — here's how to configure TLS safely.
Best practices for securing Kubernetes ConfigMaps
ConfigMaps store plaintext in etcd with no size guardrail beyond 1 MiB — teams that drop credentials in them expose secrets to a far bigger RBAC audience.
A practical guide to least privilege in Kubernetes RBAC
One RBAC flaw, CVE-2018-1002105 (CVSS 9.8), let any authenticated user escalate to cluster-admin — here's how to actually scope roles so that never happens again.
Securing the Argo CD to Kubernetes GitOps Pipeline
One symlinked Helm values file (CVE-2022-24348, CVSS 7.7) let attackers read secrets across Argo CD tenants — GitOps trust needs hardening, not just adoption.
Running Multiple Custom Controllers Without RBAC or CRD Collisions
Kubernetes CRDs are singletons by group and kind, and RBAC has no tenant concept — two facts that quietly break most multi-controller clusters.
Secure multi-tenant SaaS access control patterns
Broken Access Control has topped OWASP's Top 10 for two straight cycles, found in 100% of tested apps in 2025 — most of that risk starts with one missing tenant_id check.
Designing Least-Privilege Kubernetes RBAC: A Practical Guide
CVE-2018-1002105 (CVSS 9.8) let an unauthenticated request reach cluster-admin through pod exec endpoints — most RBAC breaches since trace back to the same handful of over-broad bindings.
Kubernetes secrets management vulnerability guide
Kubernetes Secrets are base64, not encrypted. Real CVEs and the Tesla breach show how attackers exploit that gap — and how to close it.
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