Announcing the Auto-refreshing Official Kubernetes CVE Feed

Author: Pushkar Joglekar (VMware)

A long-standing request from the Kubernetes community has been to have a programmatic way for end users to keep track of Kubernetes security issues (also called "CVEs", after the database that tracks public security issues across different products and vendors). Accompanying the release of Kubernetes v1.25, we are excited to announce availability of such a feed as an alpha feature. This blog will cover the background and scope of this new service.

Motivation

With the growing number of eyes on Kubernetes, the number of CVEs related to Kubernetes have increased. Although most CVEs that directly, indirectly, or transitively impact Kubernetes are regularly fixed, there is no single place for the end users of Kubernetes to programmatically subscribe or pull the data of fixed CVEs. Current options are either broken or incomplete.

Scope

What This Does

Create a periodically auto-refreshing, human and machine-readable list of official Kubernetes CVEs

What This Doesn't Do

• Triage and vulnerability disclosure will continue to be done by SRC (Security Response Committee).
• Listing CVEs that are identified in build time dependencies and container images are out of scope.
• Only official CVEs announced by the Kubernetes SRC will be published in the feed.

Who It's For

• End Users: Persons or teams who use Kubernetes to deploy applications they own
• Platform Providers: Persons or teams who manage Kubernetes clusters
• Maintainers: Persons or teams who create and support Kubernetes releases through their work in Kubernetes Community - via various Special Interest Groups and Committees.

Implementation Details

A supporting contributor blog was published that describes in depth on how this CVE feed was implemented to ensure the feed was reasonably protected against tampering and was automatically updated after a new CVE was announced.

What's Next?

In order to graduate this feature, SIG Security is gathering feedback from end users who are using this alpha feed.

So in order to improve the feed in future Kubernetes Releases, if you have any feedback, please let us know by adding a comment to this tracking issue or let us know on #sig-security-tooling Kubernetes Slack channel. (Join Kubernetes Slack here)

A special shout out and massive thanks to Neha Lohia (@nehalohia27) and Tim Bannister (@sftim) for their stellar collaboration for many months from "ideation to implementation" of this feature.

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