All Your Containers Are Belong to Us

The rising adoption of container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, has enabled developers to scale cloud applications quickly and efficiently. However with this adoption comes with a new set of security challenges, such as securing the APIs us...

The rising adoption of container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, has enabled developers to scale cloud applications quickly and efficiently. However with this adoption comes with a new set of security challenges, such as securing the APIs used to manage these ecosystems. We recently conducted a research study that uncovered more than 20,000 publicly accessible management nodes open to the Internet. In this talk we will discuss the implications of the findings and provide recommendations for running orchestration systems securely in the public cloud. The following platforms are exposed and part of the research: Kubernetes, Mesos Marathon, RedHat OpenShift, Docker Swarm, and Portainer (Docker Management). Not only are these management UIs available on the web but we also discovered that their APIs are also available. Some are wide open. We will uncover how we did this research, who is the most popular cloud provider hosting the containers, which regions are most popular, and show demonstrations of exploitation and discover.