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

Weekend Reads 053124


In this episode of the RIPE Labs podcast, three Internet pioneers talk about how they helped grow the Internet out of its early infancy, back when its purpose – and much of the excitement around its development – lay in the promise of connecting researchers from around the world.


Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also now is in the AI-focused processor game. The company recently unveiled the next generation of custom-made chips to help power AI-driven rankings and recommendation ads on social media platforms.


Phishing threats have reached unprecedented levels of sophistication in the past year, driven by the proliferation of generative AI tools.


In recent news, more than 13,000 subdomains of brands were hijacked for a large spam campaign that “leverages the trust associated with these domains to circulate spam and malicious phishing emails by the millions each day, cunningly using their credibility and stolen resources to slip past security measures.”


Tenable Research has discovered a critical memory corruption vulnerability dubbed Linguistic Lumberjack in Fluent Bit, a core component in the monitoring infrastructure of many cloud services.


Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part Continue reading

Extending local traffic management load balancing to Layer 4 with Spectrum

In 2023, Cloudflare introduced a new load balancing solution, supporting Local Traffic Management (LTM). This gives organizations a way to balance HTTP(S) traffic between private or internal servers within a region-specific data center. Today, we are thrilled to be able to extend those same LTM capabilities to non-HTTP(S) traffic. This new feature is enabled by the integration of Cloudflare Spectrum, Cloudflare Tunnels, and Cloudflare load balancers and is available to enterprise customers. Our customers can now use Cloudflare load balancers for all TCP and UDP traffic destined for private IP addresses, eliminating the need for expensive on-premise load balancers.

A quick primer

In this blog post, we will be referring to load balancers at either layer 4 or layer 7. This is, of course, referring to layers of the OSI model but more specifically, the ingress path that is being used to reach the load balancer. Layer 7, also known as the Application Layer, is where the HTTP(S) protocol exists. Cloudflare is well known for our layer 7 capabilities, which are built around speeding up and protecting websites which run over HTTP(S). When we refer to layer 7 load balancers, we are referring to HTTP(S)-based services. Our layer Continue reading

Technology Short Take 178

Welcome to Technology Short Take #178! This one is notably shorter than many of the Technology Short Takes I publish; I’m still trying to fine-tune my collection of RSS feeds (such a useful technology that seems to have fallen out of favor), removing inactive feeds and looking for new feeds to replace them. Regardless, I have managed to collect a few links for your reading pleasure this weekend. Enjoy!

Networking

Security

  • Matt Moore, CTO of Chainguard, goes into some detail on how Chainguard intends to honor the principles behind the CISA’s Secure by Design pledge.
  • Ars Technica examines TunnelVision, a vulnerability that has existed since 2002 and has the potential to render VPN apps useless. From my reading of the article, the greatest concern lies with untrusted networks where an attacker could manipulate things in their favor. Join that Wi-Fi network at the coffee shop at your own risk!
  • Here’s a slightly older post (March 2023) on using AppArmor to restrict app permissions, with a particular focus on containers (including Kubernetes). It’s a bit basic, but it does (in my opinion) provide some useful information.
  • Nick Frichette shares some Continue reading

Worth Reading: ChatGPT Does Not Summarize

I mostly gave up on LLMs being any help (apart from generating copious amounts of bullshit), but I still thought that generating summaries might be an interesting use case. I was wrong.

As Gerben Wierda explains in his recent “When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind” blog post, you have to understand a text if you want to generate a useful summary, and that’s not what LLMs do. They can generate a shorter version of the text, which might not focus on the significant bits.

Endpoint Selectors and Kubernetes Namespaces in CiliumNetworkPolicies

While performing some testing with CiliumNetworkPolicies, I came across a behavior that was unintuitive and unexpected to me. The behavior centers around how an endpoint selector behaves in a CiliumNetworkPolicies when Kubernetes namespaces are involved. (If you didn’t understand a bit of what I just said, I’ll provide some additional explanation shortly—stay with me!) After chatting through the behavior with a few folks, I realized the behavior is essentially “correct” and expected. However, if I was confused by the behavior then there’s a good chance others might be confused by the behavior as well, so I thought a quick blog post might be a good idea. Keep reading to get more details on the interaction between endpoint selectors and Kubernetes namespaces in CiliumNetworkPolicies.

Before digging into the behavior, let me first provide some definitions or explanations of the various things involved here:

  • Kubernetes namespaces are a way to logically isolate groups of resources in a cluster. For example, you might install the software that drives your point-of-sale (PoS) devices in the “retail-pos” namespace while the application that handles inventory is in the “inventory” namespace. You can read more about namespaces in the Kubernetes documentation.
  • CiliumNetworkPolicies are Cilium-specific network policies Continue reading

Disrupting FlyingYeti’s campaign targeting Ukraine

Cloudforce One is publishing the results of our investigation and real-time effort to detect, deny, degrade, disrupt, and delay threat activity by the Russia-aligned threat actor FlyingYeti during their latest phishing campaign targeting Ukraine. At the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukraine introduced a moratorium on evictions and termination of utility services for unpaid debt. The moratorium ended in January 2024, resulting in significant debt liability and increased financial stress for Ukrainian citizens. The FlyingYeti campaign capitalized on anxiety over the potential loss of access to housing and utilities by enticing targets to open malicious files via debt-themed lures. If opened, the files would result in infection with the PowerShell malware known as COOKBOX, allowing FlyingYeti to support follow-on objectives, such as installation of additional payloads and control over the victim’s system.

Since April 26, 2024, Cloudforce One has taken measures to prevent FlyingYeti from launching their phishing campaign – a campaign involving the use of Cloudflare Workers and GitHub, as well as exploitation of the WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2023-38831. Our countermeasures included internal actions, such as detections and code takedowns, as well as external collaboration with third parties to remove the actor’s cloud-hosted malware. Continue reading

Cloudflare acquires BastionZero to extend Zero Trust access to IT infrastructure

We’re excited to announce that BastionZero, a Zero Trust infrastructure access platform, has joined Cloudflare. This acquisition extends our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) flows with native access management for infrastructure like servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases.

Security teams often prioritize application and Internet access because these are the primary vectors through which users interact with corporate resources and external threats infiltrate networks. Applications are typically the most visible and accessible part of an organization's digital footprint, making them frequent targets for cyberattacks. Securing application access through methods like Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can yield immediate and tangible improvements in user security.

However, infrastructure access is equally critical and many teams still rely on castle-and-moat style network controls and local resource permissions to protect infrastructure like servers, databases, Kubernetes clusters, and more. This is difficult and fraught with risk because the security controls are fragmented across hundreds or thousands of targets. Bad actors are increasingly focusing on targeting infrastructure resources as a way to take down huge swaths of applications at once or steal sensitive data. We are excited to extend Cloudflare One’s Zero Trust Network Access to natively protect infrastructure with user- and device-based policies Continue reading

BGP Labs: Graceful Shutdown

Using the typical default router configurations, it can take minutes between a failure of an inter-AS link and the convergence of BGP routes. You can fine-tune that behavior with BGP timers and BFD (and still get pwned by Graceful Restart). While you can’t influence link failures, you could drain the traffic from a link before starting maintenance operations on it, and it would be a shame not to do that considering there’s a standard way to do that – the GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN BGP community defined in RFC 8326. That’s what you’ll practice in the next BGP lab exercise.

Explore the lab exercise

Upcoming Changes to the AWX Project

By Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, Ansible Automation at Red Hat

Back in 2013, a small team of engineers worked for over a year to make the first commercial release of Ansible Tower (before we expanded and evolved to Ansible Automation Platform) and during that time we put down the foundation of an application that I’m immensely proud of.

We, the original architects of Tower, were trying to find the best way to create a system that would allow running Ansible at scale for hundreds of thousands of servers. We wanted there to be a way to not just manage those servers but store the results of that automation and provide auditability and traceability. It needed to make Ansible functional for large teams and it succeeded.

Today, we’re not just talking about hundreds of thousands. We’re thinking in the millions and tens of millions, we’re managing automation for some of the largest IT organizations in the world. And we’re not just managing servers. In the intervening years we’ve been automating containers, cloud platforms, network devices, storage, IoT devices and PLCs (among other things). One of the main challenges that we’re facing is that some of the architectural decisions we made Continue reading

Getting Barrier Working Between Arch Linux and Ubuntu

I recently had a need to get Barrier—an open source project aimed at enabling mouse/keyboard sharing across multiple computers, aka a “software KVM”—running between Arch Linux and Ubuntu 22.04. Unfortunately, the process for getting Barrier working isn’t as intuitive as it should be, so I’m posting this information in the hopes it will prove useful to others who find themselves in a similar situation. Below, I’ll share how I got Barrier working between an Arch Linux system and an Ubuntu system.

Although this post specifically mentions Arch Linux and Ubuntu, the process for getting Barrier running should be pretty similar (if not identical) for other Linux distributions and for macOS. I don’t have any Windows-based systems on which to test these instructions, but they should be adaptable to Windows as well. Note that there may be slight differences in the flags for the commands listed here when they are run on platforms other than Linux.

Installing Barrier

Both Arch and Ubuntu 22.04 have the latest release of Barrier, version 2.4.0, available in their repositories, so the installation is straightforward.

For Arch, just install with pacman:

pacman -Ss barrier

There’s also a “barrier-headless” package in Continue reading

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