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Cyber Security Academy · Lesson

RBAC and Service Accounts

Locking down cluster access.

RBAC Controls Everything

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) decides which identities can perform which actions on which resources in a cluster. Every API call is authorized against RBAC. Misconfigured RBAC is the leading cause of in-cluster privilege escalation.

  • Subjects: users, groups, service accounts.
  • Roles bind verbs to resources.
  • Bindings connect subjects to roles.

Roles vs ClusterRoles

Two scopes exist.

  • Role + RoleBinding: namespace-scoped permissions.
  • ClusterRole + ClusterRoleBinding: cluster-wide permissions.

A ClusterRoleBinding to cluster-admin is total control. Granting it to a service account is a frequent, dangerous mistake.

All lessons in this course

  1. Kubernetes Threat Model
  2. RBAC and Service Accounts
  3. Pod Security and Network Policies
  4. Securing the Supply Chain and Secrets
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