Securing Kubernetes Service with TLS

6/17/2018

I have an application that is internal and exposed only to other application on the cluster by a service with cluster IP. Other services are accessing this application via it's DNS (serviceName-namespace.svc.cluster.local). This application handles sensitive data, so although all the communication is inside the cluster I would like to use TLS to secure the communications to this application.

My question is - how can I enable TLS on a service? Is there something already exist or should I handle it on the application code? Also, is there already a CA I can use on the cluster that can sign certificates for .svc.cluster.local?

To clarify, I know I can use ingress for this purpose. The only problem is keeping this service internal only - so only services inside the cluster will be able to access it.

Thanks, Omer

-- Omer Levi Hevroni
kubernetes
kubernetes-security
kubernetes-service
ssl
tls1.2

4 Answers

6/17/2018

Check if the tutorial "Secure Kubernetes Services with Ingress, TLS and LetsEncrypt" could apply to you:

Ingress can be backed by different implementations through the use of different Ingress Controllers. The most popular of these is the Nginx Ingress Controller, however there are other options available such as Traefik, Rancher, HAProxy, etc. Each controller should support a basic configuration, but can even expose other features (e.g. rewrite rules, auth modes) via annotations.

Give it a domain name and enable TLS. LetsEncrypt is a free TLS certificate authority, and using the kube-lego controller we can automatically request and renew LetsEncrypt certificates for public domain names, simply by adding a few lines to our Ingress definition!

In order for this to work correctly, a public domain name is required and should have an A record pointing to the external IP of the Nginx service.

For limiting to inside the cluster domain though (svc.cluster.local), you might need CoreDNS.

-- VonC
Source: StackOverflow

7/17/2018

I just found that Kubernetes API can be used to generate a certificate that will be trusted by all the pods running on the cluster. This option might be simpler than the alternatives. You can find the documentation here, including full flow of generating a certificate and using it.

-- Omer Levi Hevroni
Source: StackOverflow

6/17/2018

Following @vonc comments from bellow, I think I have a solution:

  • Purchase a public valid domain for this service (e.g. something.mycompany.com).
  • Use CoreDNS to add override rule so all requests to something.mycompany.com will go to something-namesapce.svc.cluster.local, as the service is not exposed externally (this can be done also with normal A record for my use case).
  • Use Nginx or something else to handle TLS with the certificate for something.mycompany.com.

This sounds pretty complicated but might work. What do you think?

-- Omer Levi Hevroni
Source: StackOverflow

7/29/2019

On Google Cloud you can make load balancer service internal, like this:

    annotations = {
      "cloud.google.com/load-balancer-type" = "Internal"
    }
-- orkenstein
Source: StackOverflow