How Calico Network Threat Detection Works

In today’s cloud-native environments, network security is more complex than ever, with Kubernetes and containerized workloads introducing unique challenges. Traditional tools struggle to monitor and secure these dynamic, interconnected systems, leaving organizations vulnerable to advanced threats, such as lateral movement, zero-day exploits, ransomware, data exfiltration, and more.

Network threat detection identifies malicious or suspicious activity within network traffic by using rules and analyzing patterns, behaviors, and anomalies. It enables organizations to spot attacks early, respond quickly, and mitigate risks before they escalate. Tools like Calico are specifically designed to address these challenges in Kubernetes, offering visibility, detection, and automated responses to protect workloads from known and emerging threats.

Calico delivers advanced network threat detection for Kubernetes environments, leveraging a variety of techniques to ensure comprehensive protection. Here are the key features of Calico’s network threat detection.

Behavior-based detection

Calico uses machine learning algorithms to establish a baseline of normal network behavior and detect anomalies such as port scans, IP (Internet Protocol) sweeps, and domain generation algorithms (DGA), which are commonly used by malware to evade detection and maintain communication with command and control (C2) servers.

Calico’s anomaly detection capability evaluates traffic flows using machine learning to identify the baseline behavior Continue reading

Kubernetes Security in 2025: The De Facto Platform of GenAI Applications

Over the past year, there has been a culmination of hype and excitement around Generative AI (GenAI). Most organizations initiated proof-of-concept projects for GenAI, eager to reap the technology’s benefits, which range from improved operational efficiency to cost reductions. According to recent research, 88% of organizations are in the midst of actively investigating GenAI, transcending other AI applications. However, the vast majority of organizations have yet to surpass this initial proof-of-concept stage and graduate GenAI applications into production. As we move into 2025, more organizations will begin to formalize their GenAI strategies, creating and deploying a host of new GenAI applications across their infrastructure.

Creating GenAI Applications with Kubernetes

As organizations build out GenAI applications, they will leverage many different GenAI models. To optimize, and derive the most value and accuracy from their GenAI applications, enterprises will utilize proprietary data to create these models, primarily through a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. A RAG architecture enables organizations to customize models based on company data, so that GenAI applications are personalized to an enterprise and their specific use cases. Most GenAI applications will contain proprietary company data as a result of this approach, creating many security concerns for organizations.

Consequently, some Continue reading

Introducing Low-Latency DNS Policy with eBPF in Calico Enterprise

In Kubernetes, pods often need to securely communicate with external resources, such as internet services or APIs. Traditional Kubernetes network policies use IP addresses to identify these external resources. However, managing policies with IP addresses can be challenging because IPs often change, especially when dealing with dynamic websites or APIs.

Calico Enterprise addresses this challenge by extending Kubernetes network policies to support Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs). This allows users to define policies using domain names instead of IP addresses, making it easier to manage and secure egress traffic. By dynamically mapping domain names to IPs, Calico ensures that policies remain up-to-date, enabling seamless and secure connectivity to external resources.

While this approach is conceptually simple, practical implementation is tricky. DNS mappings are dynamic: domain names often resolve to different IPs with each query, and wildcard support (e.g., *.example.com) adds complexity. To address this, Calico monitors DNS traffic to create and manage domain-to-IP mappings dynamically, translating high-level DNS-based rules into efficient low-level constructs like iptables, nftables, or eBPF.

Evolution of Calico DNS policy implementation

The DNS policy implementation significantly impacts performance and reliability. Currently, Calico offers three different modes to operate the DNS Continue reading

How Kubernetes Simplifies Configuration Security

This is the second blog post in a series exploring how Kubernetes, despite its inherent complexity, provides features that simplify security efforts.

Kubernetes presents an interesting paradox: while it is complex, it simplifies many aspects of deploying and managing containerized applications, including configuration security. Once you navigate its learning curve, Kubernetes unlocks powerful capabilities and tool support that make managing configuration security significantly easier.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into how Kubernetes enhances configuration security and outline its key advantages.

How Kubernetes Can Help Improve and Simplify Configuration Security

Despite its complexity, Kubernetes offers a range of features that simplify configuration security. These include enhanced visibility, streamlined access to log data, robust RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) capabilities, security policy as code, a layered network policy model, and more. Many of these capabilities also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation and remediation workflows for configuration security. Below, we highlight key features that should be considered when developing a configuration security strategy.

100% Inventory

Maintaining a complete inventory of workloads can be challenging in non-Kubernetes environments. However, Kubernetes provides complete visibility into every containerized workload running in the system. This eliminates concerns about shadow systems or overlooked resources that could Continue reading

Calico monthly roundup: July 2024

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: July edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

Exclusive: Cloud and container security leaders round table and dinner An exclusive, invite-only round table and dinner designed specifically for cloud and container security leaders. This intimate gathering will discuss today’s most pressing issues facing cloud and container security. Learn More.

Your Guide to Observability This guide explains what observability is and shows you how to use Calico’s observability tools. With these tools, you can find and troubleshoot issues with workload communications, performance, and operations in a Kubernetes cluster. Read guide.

Customer case study: Playtech Calico seamlessly integrated with Amazon EKS GitOps model to enhance Playtech’s application security. Read the case study to learn more. Read case study.

Open source news

Calico Live stream: Mitigating RCE zero-day attacks with Calico security policies – This live session on July 31, 2024 will examine the capabilities of Calico security policies to mitigate RCE attacks in a cloud-native environment. You can watch the live session on YouTube or LinkedIn.

Calico enhancements

• Calico v3.27.4 is out and here is why you should install or update your Calico instance:
  • Continue reading

Native Kubernetes cluster mesh with Calico

workloads from remote clusters

As Kubernetes continues to gain traction in the cloud-native ecosystem, the need for robust, scalable, and highly available cluster deployments has become more noticeable.

While a Kubernetes cluster can easily expand via additional nodes, the downside of such an approach is that you might have to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the underlying networking or managing and updating resources between clusters. On top of that, a multi-regional scenario or hyper-cloud environment might be off the limits depending on the limitations that a cloud provider or your Kubernetes distro might impose on your environment.

Calico Enterprise cluster mesh is a suite of features native to Kubernetes with a multi-layer design that connects two or more Kubernetes clusters and seamlessly shares resources between them. This post will explore cluster mesh, its benefits, and how it can enhance your Kubernetes environment.

Projects that provide cluster mesh

Multiple projects offer cluster mesh, and while they are all similar in basic principles, each has a different take on implementing this solution in an environment.

The following table is a brief overview of notable projects that offer cluster mesh:

eBPF: Enabling Security and Performance to Co-Exist

Today, most organizations and individuals use Linux and the Linux kernel with a “one-size-fits-all” approach. This differs from how Linux was used in the past–for example, 20 years ago, many users would compile their kernel and modify it to fit their specific needs, architectures and use cases. This is no longer the case, as one-size-fits-all has become good enough. But, like anything in life, “good enough” is not the best you can get.

Enter: Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). eBPF allows users to modify one-size-fits-all to fit their specific needs. While this was not impossible before, it was cumbersome and often unsecure.

eBPF is a feature available in Linux kernels that allows users to safely load programs into the kernel, to customize its operation. With eBPF, the kernel and its behavior become highly customizable, instead of being fixed.

Utilizing eBPF, users can load a program into the kernel and instruct the kernel to execute their program if, for example, a certain packet is seen or another event occurs. eBPF lets programs run without needing to add additional modules or modify the kernel source code. Users can think of it as a lightweight, sandboxed virtual machine (VM) within the Linux kernel Continue reading

Embracing Modern Virtualization with Calico’s Microsegmentation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, enterprises are increasingly moving away from traditional virtualization platforms due to rising licensing costs and the limitations these older systems impose on modern cloud-native application needs. The shift towards Kubernetes, which can manage diverse workloads such as containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal environments, accelerates the migration from traditional virtualization platforms.

The Limitations of Traditional Network Segmentation

Traditionally, enterprises have segmented their virtualized environments using VLANs and logical switches to create distinct virtual networks and security zones. This segmentation was primarily static VM environments. However, this traditional approach to network segmentation is ill-equipped to handle the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, where workloads are frequently created and destroyed, leading to rapidly changing network configurations and policies.

Calico’s Solution: Dynamic and Unified Microsegmentation

Calico is designed to address the shortcomings of traditional network segmentation in the age of Kubernetes and container-based architectures. Calico provides a robust, dynamic, and high-performance network policy engine that supports a diverse range of workloads and scales across environments.

Key Features of Calico’s Microsegmentation:

1. Unified Security Model: Calico offers a consistent security model across various environments, whether you are managing VMs, containers, or bare metal. This unified approach Continue reading

Embracing Modern Virtualization with Calico’s Microsegmentation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, enterprises are increasingly moving away from traditional virtualization platforms due to rising licensing costs and the limitations these older systems impose on modern cloud-native application needs. The shift towards Kubernetes, which can manage diverse workloads such as containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal environments, accelerates the migration from traditional virtualization platforms.

The Limitations of Traditional Network Segmentation

Traditionally, enterprises have segmented their virtualized environments using VLANs and logical switches to create distinct virtual networks and security zones. This segmentation was primarily static VM environments. However, this traditional approach to network segmentation is ill-equipped to handle the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, where workloads are frequently created and destroyed, leading to rapidly changing network configurations and policies.

Calico’s Solution: Dynamic and Unified Microsegmentation

Calico’s microsegmentation capabilities are designed to address the shortcomings of traditional network segmentation in the age of Kubernetes and container-based architectures. Calico provides a robust, dynamic, and high-performance network policy engine that supports a diverse range of workloads and scales across environments.

Key Features of Calico’s Microsegmentation:

1. Unified Security Model: Calico offers a consistent security model across various environments, whether you are managing VMs, containers, or bare metal. This Continue reading

Calico monthly roundup: June 2024

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: June edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

S&P Global 451 Market Insight: Tigera Provides Most Comprehensive CNAPP Learn how Tigera differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on runtime security, aligning with the rapidly growing market category and how it is one of the strong players in this segment. Read the blog post.

Your Guide to Observability This guide explains what observability is and shows you how to use Calico’s observability tools. With these tools, you can find and troubleshoot issues with workload communications, performance, and operations in a Kubernetes cluster.Read case study.

Customer case study: eHealth Calico helped eHealth gain visibility and implement zero-trust security controls on Amazon EKS. Read the case study to learn more. View more tradeshows.

Open source news

Kubernetes network policies: 4 pain points and how to address them – Learn about the challenges of implementing Kubernetes network policies and how to simplify their management and enhance security using Calico. Read blog post.

The power of Kubevirt and Calico – Unlock the combined power of Kubevirt and Calico for your Kubernetes environments. Learn how to streamline VM management, Continue reading

Kubernetes network policies: 4 pain points and how to address them

Kubernetes is used everywhere, from test environments to the most critical production foundations that we use daily, making it undoubtedly a de facto in cloud computing. While this is great news for everyone who works with, administers, and expands Kubernetes, the downside is that it makes Kubernetes a favorable target for malicious actors.

Malicious actors typically exploit flaws in the system to gain access to a portion of the environment. They then chain these flaws together to move laterally within the environment, ultimately seeking root access or access to critical information.

While the best way to fix security flaws in any software is to patch it with appropriate fixes that the project maintainers publish, there are certain security practices that you can adopt to fortify your environment, like using network policies. However, most people find network policies complex and overwhelming, which discourages them from implementing policies in their environment.

In this blog post, we will examine four pain points that people face when they want to implement network policies and provide solutions to help you effectively secure your Kubernetes environment.

What is a network policy and why should I use it?

In Kubernetes, a network policy (KNP) resource is the Continue reading

How to Address Kubernetes Risks and Vulnerabilities Head-on

Misconfigurations and container image vulnerabilities are major causes of Kubernetes threats and risks. According to Gartner, more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2027. This is a significant increase from fewer than 40% in 2021. As container adoption soars, Kubernetes remains the dominant container orchestration platform.

Realizing the full benefits of Kubernetes requires implementing processes and solutions to fight vulnerabilities, threats and risks, including issues stemming from human error such as misconfigurations, and inherent vulnerabilities like those from container images. DevOps and security teams need the right solutions to mitigate the risks and enjoy the full benefits of Kubernetes.

Mitigating the Impact of Misconfigurations

While container adoption has taken off, the industry still lacks skilled Kubernetes experts. Kubernetes is a complex platform, and personnel without the right skillset inadvertently — and frequently—make mistakes that create misconfigurations.

In the Red Hat State of Kubernetes Security Report 2023, more than 50% of respondents said they were concerned about misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. And with good reason: The simplest way for attackers to get to a company’s data, applications or code is through a misconfigured Kubernetes cluster. A bad actor needs just one small misconfiguration Continue reading

Calico monthly roundup: May 2024

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: May edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

What’s new in Calico Discover the latest enhancements in Calico for Spring 2024, featuring new security capabilities, improved visualization tools, and an advanced workload-centric WAF to streamline and secure your Kubernetes operations. Read the blog post.

Customer case study: NuraLogix AI-driven healthtech company, NuraLogix, improves security and compliance on Amazon EKS using Calico Cloud. Read case study.

Join us at CloudNative SecurityCon 2024 in Seattle We’re gearing up for CloudNative SecurityCon 2024, on June 26 and 27 in Seattle. Be sure to swing by our booth and learn about exciting container networking updates. Plus, pick up some cool new Calico swag! Stay tuned for details. View more tradeshows.

S&P Global 451 Market Insight: Tigera Provides Most Comprehensive CNAPP Learn how Tigera differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on runtime security, aligning with the rapidly growing market category and how it is one of the strong players in this segment. Read report.

Open source news

What’s new in 3.28 – Explore the new features in Calico 3.28, including a Grafana dashboard for Typha performance monitoring, Continue reading

Network observability in Kubernetes clusters for better security and faster troubleshooting

For DevOps and platform teams working with containers and Kubernetes, reducing downtime and improving security posture is crucial. A clear understanding of network topology, service interactions, and workload dependencies is required in cloud-native applications. This is essential for securing and optimizing the Kubernetes deployment and minimizing response time in the event of failure.

Network observability can highlight gaps in network policies for applications that require network policy controls to reduce the risk of attack from unsecured egress access or lateral movement of threats within the Kubernetes cluster. However, visualizing workload communication, service dependencies, and active and inactive network security policies presents significant challenges due to the distributed and dynamic nature of Kubernetes workloads.

Why is network observability difficult with Kubernetes workloads?

Kubernetes scales up and scales out pods and creates and destroys services depending on real-time business requirements, resulting in dynamic network connections for each workload instance. Network access policies defined for each workload further impact these connections.

In such a scenario, capturing an accurate and up-to-date representation of network traffic, service dependencies, and network policies is difficult. The default Kubernetes implementation provides limited network traffic visibility and policy information, making it challenging for teams to troubleshoot connectivity issues, improve Continue reading

Container Security: Protect your data with Calico Egress Access Controls

23andMe is a popular genetics testing company, which was valued at $6B in 2021. Unfortunately, there was a massive data breach in December 2023, which caused a steep decline in the company’s value and trust, plummeting the company to a penny stock. While this breach was not directly related to Kubernetes, the same risks apply to containers running in your Kubernetes environments. If your containerized applications do not have the right egress access controls defined, chances of data exfiltration are much higher.

The basics

A typical modus operandi for threat actors is to look for vulnerabilities or misconfiguration in the environment and workloads, install malicious pods through privilege escalation techniques, and then exploit this unsecured pod to exfiltrate data.

An easy reconnaissance technique by just scanning the cluster network for public-facing workloads will be a first starting point for most attackers. Privilege escalation occurs mostly due to inconsistent or incorrect RBAC policies in Kubernetes through which unauthorized users can gain root privileges. Vulnerabilities in container images as part of the supply chain are also another attack path. All of these techniques will ultimately land on an exposed pod with a remote code Continue reading

Modern Egress Gateway: Assign stable IPs to traffic leaving Kubernetes clusters

Whether an enterprise is migrating its legacy application to a cloud-native architecture or deploying a new cloud-native application, it will face the challenge of integrating with security tools such as firewalls that rely on a stable network identity for security configuration. This is due to the fact that cloud-native workloads aren’t guaranteed to have a fixed network identity. The juxtaposition of dynamic, modern workloads alongside traditional applications that rely on fixed network identifiers presents a unique set of challenges.

This is particularly pertinent for DevOps and platform teams tasked with ensuring seamless communication and security between these disparate environments. It becomes crucial for DevOps, platforms, and network security teams to ensure seamless communication and secure traffic flow as organizations balance innovation (cloud-native applications) and harness existing investments (traditional firewalls and data sources).

Common Scenarios

Securing and Identifying Traffic Leaving the Cluster

One of the key challenges in integrating cloud-native workloads with legacy applications behind a firewall is securing and identifying traffic from specific workloads running in the cluster. Many applications, such as databases, are protected by firewalls that need a stable IP address to enable access to these applications. Teams want to ensure that only authorized traffic from specific workloads Continue reading

What’s new in Calico – Spring 2024

Calico, the leading solution for container networking and security, unveils a host of new features this spring. From new security capabilities that simplify operations, enhanced visualization for faster troubleshooting, and major enhancements to its popular workload-centric distributed WAF, Calico is set to redefine how you manage and secure your containerized workloads.

This blog describes the new capabilities in Calico.

Simplified security operations for Runtime Threat Detection

Runtime threat detection generates a large number of security events. However, managing and analyzing these events can be challenging, and users need a way to summarize and navigate through them to gain deeper insights and take appropriate actions. Let’s see how Calico simplifies runtime security operations.

New Security Events Dashboard

We are excited to announce the introduction of the Security Event Dashboard in Calico. This dashboard provides a summary of the security events generated by the runtime threat detection engine. With the Security Event Dashboard, users can easily analyze and pivot around the data, enabling them to:

• Efficiently find and analyze specific segments of security events.
• Collaborate with stakeholders involved in the analysis, response, and remediation of security events.

The Security Event Dashboard offers a visually appealing and user-friendly interface, presenting key summarizations of Continue reading

What is new in Calico 3.28

TL/DR

• A new Grafana dashboard that helps you monitor Calico Typha’s performance and troubleshoot issues.
• Calico eBPF dataplane IPv6 is now GA. It supports true IPv6-only clusters as well as dual-stack clusters.
• Optional Pod startup delay to ensure networking is up in high-churn scenarios.
• Tigera operator now supports multiple IP pools, IP pool modification, affinity for operator pods, priorityclassname, and more!
• Improved policy performance in both eBPF and iptables.
• Calico now ships with a pprof server. Activate the performance server for real-time views of Typha and Felix components and real-time debugging.

Important changes

Calico 3.28 now has enabled VXLAN checksum offload by default for environments with the kernel version of 5.8 or above. In the past, offloading was disabled due to kernel bugs.

Please keep in mind, if you are upgrading to 3.28 this change will take effect after node restarts.

If you encounter unexpected performance issues, you can use the following command to revert to the previous method by using the following command:

kubectl patch felixconfiguration default --type="merge" -p='{"spec":{"FeatureDetectOverride":"ChecksumOffloadBroken=true"}'

Please keep in mind that you can report any issues via GitHub tickets or Slack and include a detailed description of the environment (NIC hardware, kernel, distro, Continue reading

Amazon EKS networking options

When setting up a Kubernetes environment with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), it is crucial to understand your available networking options. EKS offers a range of networking choices that allow you to build a highly available and scalable cloud environment for your workloads.

In this blog post, we will explore the networking and policy enforcement options provided by AWS for Amazon EKS. By the end, you will have a clear understanding of the different networking options and network policy enforcement engines, and other features that can help you create a functional and secure platform for your Kubernetes workloads and services.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies routine operations, such as cluster deployment and maintenance, by automating tasks such as patching and updating operating systems and their underlying components. EKS enhances scalability through AWS Auto Scaling groups and other AWS service integrations and offers a highly available control plane to manage your cluster.

Amazon EKS in the cloud has two options:

• Managed
• Self-managed

Managed clusters rely on the AWS control plane node, which AWS hosts and controls separately from your cluster. This node operates in isolation and cannot be directly Continue reading

3 observability best practices for improved security in cloud-native applications

Why is observability important for better security?

Observability, especially in the context of cloud-native applications, is important for several reasons. First and foremost is security. By design, cloud-native applications rely on multiple, dynamic, distributed, and highly ephemeral components or microservices, with each microservice operating and scaling independently to deliver the application functionality. In this type of microservices-based architecture, observability and metrics provide security insights that enable teams to identify and mitigate zero-day threats through the detection of anomalies in microservices metrics, such as traffic flow, process calls, syscalls, and more. Using machine learning (ML) and heuristic analysis, security teams can identify abnormal behavior and issue alerts.

Observability also enables security teams to visualize the blast radius in the event of a breach. Using this information, teams can apply mitigating controls, such as security policy updates, to isolate the breached microservice and thereby limit exposure.

And finally, observability helps DevOps teams maintain the quality of service by identifying service failure and performance hotspots, and conducting a detailed investigation with capabilities such as packet capture and distributed tracing.

Observability challenges

DevOps and SRE teams today are being overwhelmed by an enormous amount of data from multiple, disparate systems that monitor infrastructure and Continue reading