Security and compliance

Containers package an application and all its dependencies into a single image that can be promoted from development, to test, to production, without change. A container might be part of a larger application that works closely with other containers.

Containers provide consistency across environments and multiple deployment targets: physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), and private or public cloud.

Some of the benefits of using containers include:

See Understanding Linux containers from the Red Hat Customer Portal to find out more about Linux containers. To learn about RHEL container tools, see Building, running, and managing containers in the RHEL product documentation.

Automating how containerized applications are deployed, run, and managed is the job of a platform such as OpenShift Container Platform. At its core, OpenShift Container Platform relies on the Kubernetes project to provide the engine for orchestrating containers across many nodes in scalable data centers.

Kubernetes is a project, which can run using different operating systems and add-on components that offer no guarantees of supportability from the project. As a result, the security of different Kubernetes platforms can vary.

OpenShift Container Platform is designed to lock down Kubernetes security and integrate the platform with a variety of extended components. To do this, OpenShift Container Platform draws on the extensive Red Hat ecosystem of open source technologies that include the operating systems, authentication, storage, networking, development tools, base container images, and many other components.

OpenShift Container Platform can leverage Red Hat’s experience in uncovering and rapidly deploying fixes for vulnerabilities in the platform itself as well as the containerized applications running on the platform. Red Hat’s experience also extends to efficiently integrating new components with OpenShift Container Platform as they become available and adapting technologies to individual customer needs.

Containers simplify the act of deploying many applications to run on the same host, using the same kernel and container runtime to spin up each container. The applications can be owned by many users and, because they are kept separate, can run different, and even incompatible, versions of those applications at the same time without issue.

In Linux, containers are just a special type of process, so securing containers is similar in many ways to securing any other running process. An environment for running containers starts with an operating system that can secure the host kernel from containers and other processes running on the host, as well as secure containers from each other.

Because OpenShift Container Platform 4.9 runs on RHCOS hosts, with the option of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as worker nodes, the following concepts apply by default to any deployed OpenShift Container Platform cluster. These RHEL security features are at the core of what makes running containers in OpenShift Container Platform more secure:

RHCOS is a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that is specially configured to work as control plane (master) and worker nodes on OpenShift Container Platform clusters. So RHCOS is tuned to efficiently run container workloads, along with Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform services.

To further protect RHCOS systems in OpenShift Container Platform clusters, most containers, except those managing or monitoring the host system itself, should run as a non-root user. Dropping the privilege level or creating containers with the least amount of privileges possible is recommended best practice for protecting your own OpenShift Container Platform clusters.

Traditional virtualization provides another way to keep application environments separate on the same physical host. However, virtual machines work in a different way than containers. Virtualization relies on a hypervisor spinning up guest virtual machines (VMs), each of which has its own operating system (OS), represented by a running kernel, as well as the running application and its dependencies.

With VMs, the hypervisor isolates the guests from each other and from the host kernel. Fewer individuals and processes have access to the hypervisor, reducing the attack surface on the physical server. That said, security must still be monitored: one guest VM might be able to use hypervisor bugs to gain access to another VM or the host kernel. And, when the OS needs to be patched, it must be patched on all guest VMs using that OS.

Containers can be run inside guest VMs, and there might be use cases where this is desirable. For example, you might be deploying a traditional application in a container, perhaps to lift-and-shift an application to the cloud.

Container separation on a single host, however, provides a more lightweight, flexible, and easier-to-scale deployment solution. This deployment model is particularly appropriate for cloud-native applications. Containers are generally much smaller than VMs and consume less memory and CPU.

See Linux Containers Compared to KVM Virtualization in the RHEL 7 container documentation to learn about the differences between container and VMs.

When you deploy OpenShift Container Platform, you have the choice of an installer-provisioned infrastructure (there are several available platforms) or your own user-provisioned infrastructure. Some low-level security-related configuration, such as enabling FIPS compliance or adding kernel modules required at first boot, might benefit from a user-provisioned infrastructure. Likewise, user-provisioned infrastructure is appropriate for disconnected OpenShift Container Platform deployments.

Keep in mind that, when it comes to making security enhancements and other configuration changes to OpenShift Container Platform, the goals should include:

In pursuit of those goals, most node changes should be done during installation through Ignition or later using MachineConfigs that are applied to sets of nodes by the Machine Config Operator. Examples of security-related configuration changes you can do in this way include:

Besides the Machine Config Operator, there are several other Operators available to configure OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure that are managed by the Cluster Version Operator (CVO). The CVO is able to automate many aspects of OpenShift Container Platform cluster updates.

The RHEL 8 Security Hardening guide describes how you should approach security for any RHEL system.

Use this guide to learn how to approach cryptography, evaluate vulnerabilities, and assess threats to various services. Likewise, you can learn how to scan for compliance standards, check file integrity, perform auditing, and encrypt storage devices.

With the knowledge of what features you want to harden, you can then decide how to harden them in RHCOS.

Direct modification of RHCOS systems in OpenShift Container Platform is discouraged. Instead, you should think of modifying systems in pools of nodes, such as worker nodes and control plane nodes. When a new node is needed, in non-bare metal installs, you can request a new node of the type you want and it will be created from an RHCOS image plus the modifications you created earlier.

There are opportunities for modifying RHCOS before installation, during installation, and after the cluster is up and running.

Enabling container signature validation for Red Hat Container Registries requires writing a signature verification policy file specifying the keys to verify images from these registries. For RHEL8 nodes, the registries are already defined in /etc/containers/registries.d by default.

After you apply the machine configs to the cluster, the Machine Config Controller detects the new MachineConfig object and generates a new rendered-worker-<hash> version.

FIPS compliance is one of the most critical components required in highly secure environments, to ensure that only supported cryptographic technologies are allowed on nodes.

To understand Red Hat’s view of OpenShift Container Platform compliance frameworks, refer to the Risk Management and Regulatory Readiness chapter of the OpenShift Security Guide Book.

Applications and infrastructures are composed of readily available components, many of which are open source packages such as, the Linux operating system, JBoss Web Server, PostgreSQL, and Node.js.

Containerized versions of these packages are also available. However, you need to know where the packages originally came from, what versions are used, who built them, and whether there is any malicious code inside them.

Some questions to answer include:

By building your containers from Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) you are assured of a foundation for your container images that consists of the same RPM-packaged software that is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. No subscriptions are required to either use or redistribute UBI images.

To assure ongoing security of the containers themselves, security scanning features, used directly from RHEL or added to OpenShift Container Platform, can alert you when an image you are using has vulnerabilities. OpenSCAP image scanning is available in RHEL and the Red Hat Quay Container Security Operator can be added to check container images used in OpenShift Container Platform.

To create containerized applications, you typically start with a trusted base image that offers the components that are usually provided by the operating system. These include the libraries, utilities, and other features the application expects to see in the operating system’s file system.

Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) were created to encourage anyone building their own containers to start with one that is made entirely from Red Hat Enterprise Linux rpm packages and other content. These UBI images are updated regularly to keep up with security patches and free to use and redistribute with container images built to include your own software.

Search the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog to both find and check the health of different UBI images. As someone creating secure container images, you might be interested in these two general types of UBI images:

Keep in mind that while UBI images are freely available and redistributable, Red Hat support for these images is only available through Red Hat product subscriptions.

See Using Red Hat Universal Base Images in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation for information on how to use and build on standard, minimal and init UBI images.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems, OpenSCAP scanning is available from the openscap-utils package. In RHEL, you can use the openscap-podman command to scan images for vulnerabilities. See Scanning containers and container images for vulnerabilities in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation.

OpenShift Container Platform enables you to leverage RHEL scanners with your CI/CD process. For example, you can integrate static code analysis tools that test for security flaws in your source code and software composition analysis tools that identify open source libraries to provide metadata on those libraries such as known vulnerabilities.

OpenShift Container Platform makes use of object annotations to extend functionality. External tools, such as vulnerability scanners, can annotate image objects with metadata to summarize results and control pod execution. This section describes the recognized format of this annotation so it can be reliably used in consoles to display useful data to users.

quality.images.openshift.io/<qualityType>.<providerId>: {}

quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.blackduck: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.jfrog: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/license.blackduck: {}
quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.openscap: {}

{
  "name": "OpenSCAP",
  "description": "OpenSCAP vulnerability score",
  "timestamp": "2016-09-08T05:04:46Z",
  "reference": "https://www.open-scap.org/930492",
  "compliant": true,
  "scannerVersion": "1.2",
  "summary": [
    { "label": "critical", "data": "4", "severityIndex": 3, "reference": null },
    { "label": "important", "data": "12", "severityIndex": 2, "reference": null },
    { "label": "moderate", "data": "8", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null },
    { "label": "low", "data": "26", "severityIndex": 0, "reference": null }
  ]
}

{
  "name": "Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog",
  "description": "Container health index",
  "timestamp": "2016-09-08T05:04:46Z",
  "reference": "https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016:1566",
  "compliant": null,
  "scannerVersion": "1.2",
  "summary": [
    { "label": "Health index", "data": "B", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null }
  ]
}

$ oc annotate image <image> \
    quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.redhatcatalog='{ \
    "name": "Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog", \
    "description": "Container health index", \
    "timestamp": "2020-06-01T05:04:46Z", \
    "compliant": null, \
    "scannerVersion": "1.2", \
    "reference": "https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:2347", \
    "summary": "[ \
      { "label": "Health index", "data": "B", "severityIndex": 1, "reference": null } ]" }'

annotations:
  images.openshift.io/deny-execution: true

$ curl -X PATCH \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/merge-patch+json" \
  https://<openshift_server>:6443/apis/image.openshift.io/v1/images/<image_id> \
  --data '{ <image_annotation> }'

{
"metadata": {
  "annotations": {
    "quality.images.openshift.io/vulnerability.redhatcatalog":
       "{ 'name': 'Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog', 'description': 'Container health index', 'timestamp': '2020-06-01T05:04:46Z', 'compliant': null, 'reference': 'https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:2347', 'summary': [{'label': 'Health index', 'data': '4', 'severityIndex': 1, 'reference': null}] }"
    }
  }
}

There are tools you can use to scan and track the contents of your downloaded and deployed container images. However, there are many public sources of container images. When using public container registries, you can add a layer of protection by using trusted sources.

Consuming security updates is particularly important when managing immutable containers. Immutable containers are containers that will never be changed while running. When you deploy immutable containers, you do not step into the running container to replace one or more binaries. From an operational standpoint, you rebuild and redeploy an updated container image to replace a container instead of changing it.

Red Hat certified images are:

The list of known vulnerabilities is constantly evolving, so you must track the contents of your deployed container images, as well as newly downloaded images, over time. You can use Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSAs) to alert you to any newly discovered issues in Red Hat certified container images, and direct you to the updated image. Alternatively, you can go to the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog to look up that and other security-related issues for each Red Hat image.

Red Hat lists certified container images for Red Hat products and partner offerings from the Container Images section of the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. From that catalog, you can see details of each image, including CVE, software packages listings, and health scores.

Red Hat images are actually stored in what is referred to as the Red Hat Registry, which is represented by a public container registry (registry.access.redhat.com) and an authenticated registry (registry.redhat.io). Both include basically the same set of container images, with registry.redhat.io including some additional images that require authentication with Red Hat subscription credentials.

Container content is monitored for vulnerabilities by Red Hat and updated regularly. When Red Hat releases security updates, such as fixes to glibc, DROWN, or Dirty Cow, any affected container images are also rebuilt and pushed to the Red Hat Registry.

Red Hat uses a health index to reflect the security risk for each container provided through the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. Because containers consume software provided by Red Hat and the errata process, old, stale containers are insecure whereas new, fresh containers are more secure.

To illustrate the age of containers, the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog uses a grading system. A freshness grade is a measure of the oldest and most severe security errata available for an image. "A" is more up to date than "F". See Container Health Index grades as used inside the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog for more details on this grading system.

See the Red Hat Product Security Center for details on security updates and vulnerabilities related to Red Hat software. Check out Red Hat Security Advisories to search for specific advisories and CVEs.

OpenShift Container Platform includes the OpenShift Container Registry, a private registry running as an integrated component of the platform that you can use to manage your container images. The OpenShift Container Registry provides role-based access controls that allow you to manage who can pull and push which container images.

OpenShift Container Platform also supports integration with other private registries that you might already be using, such as Red Hat Quay.

Red Hat Quay is an enterprise-quality container registry product from Red Hat. Development for Red Hat Quay is done through the upstream Project Quay. Red Hat Quay is available to deploy on-premise or through the hosted version of Red Hat Quay at Quay.io.

Security-related features of Red Hat Quay include:

Ongoing integration of Red Hat Quay with OpenShift Container Platform continues, with several OpenShift Container Platform Operators of particular interest. The Quay Bridge Operator lets you replace the internal OpenShift Container Platform registry with Red Hat Quay. The Quay Red Hat Quay Container Security Operator lets you check vulnerabilities of images running in OpenShift Container Platform that were pulled from Red Hat Quay registries.

Using OpenShift Container Platform as the standard platform for container builds enables you to guarantee the security of the build environment. Adhering to a "build once, deploy everywhere" philosophy ensures that the product of the build process is exactly what is deployed in production.

It is also important to maintain the immutability of your containers. You should not patch running containers, but rebuild and redeploy them.

As your software moves through the stages of building, testing, and production, it is important that the tools making up your software supply chain be trusted. The following figure illustrates the process and tools that could be incorporated into a trusted software supply chain for containerized software:

OpenShift Container Platform can be integrated with trusted code repositories (such as GitHub) and development platforms (such as Che) for creating and managing secure code. Unit testing could rely on Cucumber and JUnit. You could inspect your containers for vulnerabilities and compliance issues with Anchore or Twistlock, and use image scanning tools such as AtomicScan or Clair. Tools such as Sysdig could provide ongoing monitoring of your containerized applications.

You can use Source-to-Image (S2I) to combine source code and base images. Builder images make use of S2I to enable your development and operations teams to collaborate on a reproducible build environment. With Red Hat S2I images available as Universal Base Image (UBI) images, you can now freely redistribute your software with base images built from real RHEL RPM packages. Red Hat has removed subscription restrictions to allow this.

When developers commit code with Git for an application using build images, OpenShift Container Platform can perform the following functions:

You can use the integrated OpenShift Container Registry to manage access to final images. Both S2I and native build images are automatically pushed to your OpenShift Container Registry.

In addition to the included Jenkins for CI, you can also integrate your own build and CI environment with OpenShift Container Platform using RESTful APIs, as well as use any API-compliant image registry.

In some scenarios, build operations require credentials to access dependent resources, but it is undesirable for those credentials to be available in the final application image produced by the build. You can define input secrets for this purpose.

For example, when building a Node.js application, you can set up your private mirror for Node.js modules. To download modules from that private mirror, you must supply a custom .npmrc file for the build that contains a URL, user name, and password. For security reasons, you do not want to expose your credentials in the application image.

Using this example scenario, you can add an input secret to a new BuildConfig object:

You can design your container image management and build process to use container layers so that you can separate control.

For example, an operations team manages base images, while architects manage middleware, runtimes, databases, and other solutions. Developers can then focus on application layers and focus on writing code.

Because new vulnerabilities are identified daily, you need to proactively check container content over time. To do this, you should integrate automated security testing into your build or CI process. For example:

Your CI process should include policies that flag builds with issues discovered by security scans so that your team can take appropriate action to address those issues. You should sign your custom built containers to ensure that nothing is tampered with between build and deployment.

Using GitOps methodology, you can use the same CI/CD mechanisms to manage not only your application configurations, but also your OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure.

Relying on Kubernetes and Kourier, you can build, deploy, and manage serverless applications by using OpenShift Serverless in OpenShift Container Platform.

As with other builds, you can use S2I images to build your containers, then serve them using Knative services. View Knative application builds through the Topology view of the OpenShift Container Platform web console.

If something happens during the build process, or if a vulnerability is discovered after an image has been deployed, you can use tooling for automated, policy-based deployment to remediate. You can use triggers to rebuild and replace images, ensuring the immutable containers process, instead of patching running containers, which is not recommended.

For example, you build an application using three container image layers: core, middleware, and applications. An issue is discovered in the core image and that image is rebuilt. After the build is complete, the image is pushed to your OpenShift Container Registry. OpenShift Container Platform detects that the image has changed and automatically rebuilds and deploys the application image, based on the defined triggers. This change incorporates the fixed libraries and ensures that the production code is identical to the most current image.

You can use the oc set triggers command to set a deployment trigger. For example, to set a trigger for a deployment called deployment-example:

$ oc set triggers deploy/deployment-example \
    --from-image=example:latest \
    --containers=web

It is important that the intended images are actually being deployed, that the images including the contained content are from trusted sources, and they have not been altered. Cryptographic signing provides this assurance. OpenShift Container Platform enables cluster administrators to apply security policy that is broad or narrow, reflecting deployment environment and security requirements. Two parameters define this policy:

You can use these policy parameters to allow, deny, or require a trust relationship for entire registries, parts of registries, or individual images. Using trusted public keys, you can ensure that the source is cryptographically verified. The policy rules apply to nodes. Policy may be applied uniformly across all nodes or targeted for different node workloads (for example, build, zone, or environment).

{
    "default": [{"type": "reject"}],
    "transports": {
        "docker": {
            "access.redhat.com": [
                {
                    "type": "signedBy",
                    "keyType": "GPGKeys",
                    "keyPath": "/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release"
                }
            ]
        },
        "atomic": {
            "172.30.1.1:5000/openshift": [
                {
                    "type": "signedBy",
                    "keyType": "GPGKeys",
                    "keyPath": "/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release"
                }
            ],
            "172.30.1.1:5000/production": [
                {
                    "type": "signedBy",
                    "keyType": "GPGKeys",
                    "keyPath": "/etc/pki/example.com/pubkey"
                }
            ],
            "172.30.1.1:5000": [{"type": "reject"}]
        }
    }
}

The policy can be saved onto a node as /etc/containers/policy.json. Saving this file to a node is best accomplished using a new MachineConfig object. This example enforces the following rules:

A signature transport is a way to store and retrieve the binary signature blob. There are two types of signature transports.

The OpenShift Container Platform API manages signatures that use the atomic transport type. You must store the images that use this signature type in your OpenShift Container Registry. Because the docker/distribution extensions API auto-discovers the image signature endpoint, no additional configuration is required.

Signatures that use the docker transport type are served by local file or web server. These signatures are more flexible; you can serve images from any container image registry and use an independent server to deliver binary signatures.

However, the docker transport type requires additional configuration. You must configure the nodes with the URI of the signature server by placing arbitrarily-named YAML files into a directory on the host system, /etc/containers/registries.d by default. The YAML configuration files contain a registry URI and a signature server URI, or sigstore:

docker:
    access.redhat.com:
        sigstore: https://access.redhat.com/webassets/docker/content/sigstore

In this example, the Red Hat Registry, access.redhat.com, is the signature server that provides signatures for the docker transport type. Its URI is defined in the sigstore parameter. You might name this file /etc/containers/registries.d/redhat.com.yaml and use the Machine Config Operator to automatically place the file on each node in your cluster. No service restart is required since policy and registries.d files are dynamically loaded by the container runtime.

The Secret object type provides a mechanism to hold sensitive information such as passwords, OpenShift Container Platform client configuration files, dockercfg files, and private source repository credentials. Secrets decouple sensitive content from pods. You can mount secrets into containers using a volume plugin or the system can use secrets to perform actions on behalf of a pod.

For example, to add a secret to your deployment configuration so that it can access a private image repository, do the following:

Config maps are similar to secrets, but are designed to support working with strings that do not contain sensitive information. The ConfigMap object holds key-value pairs of configuration data that can be consumed in pods or used to store configuration data for system components such as controllers.

You can integrate your own continuous deployment (CD) tooling with OpenShift Container Platform.

By leveraging CI/CD and OpenShift Container Platform, you can automate the process of rebuilding the application to incorporate the latest fixes, testing, and ensuring that it is deployed everywhere within the environment.

Multitenancy allows applications on an OpenShift Container Platform cluster that are owned by multiple users, and run across multiple hosts and namespaces, to remain isolated from each other and from outside attacks. You obtain multitenancy by applying role-based access control (RBAC) to Kubernetes namespaces.

In Kubernetes, namespaces are areas where applications can run in ways that are separate from other applications. OpenShift Container Platform uses and extends namespaces by adding extra annotations, including MCS labeling in SELinux, and identifying these extended namespaces as projects. Within the scope of a project, users can maintain their own cluster resources, including service accounts, policies, constraints, and various other objects.

RBAC objects are assigned to projects to authorize selected users to have access to those projects. That authorization takes the form of rules, roles, and bindings:

Local RBAC roles and bindings attach a user or group to a particular project. Cluster RBAC can attach cluster-wide roles and bindings to all projects in a cluster. There are default cluster roles that can be assigned to provide admin, basic-user, cluster-admin, and cluster-status access.

While RBAC controls access rules between users and groups and available projects, admission plugins define access to the OpenShift Container Platform master API. Admission plugins form a chain of rules that consist of:

API requests go through admissions plugins in a chain, with any failure along the way causing the request to be rejected. Each admission plugin is associated with particular resources and only responds to requests for those resources.

OpenShift Container Platform has multiple components within its framework that use REST-based HTTPS communication leveraging encryption via TLS certificates. OpenShift Container Platform’s installer configures these certificates during installation. There are some primary components that generate this traffic:

OpenShift Container Platform uses software-defined networking (SDN) to provide a unified cluster network that enables communication between containers across the cluster.

Network policy mode, by default, makes all pods in a project accessible from other pods and network endpoints. To isolate one or more pods in a project, you can create NetworkPolicy objects in that project to indicate the allowed incoming connections. Using multitenant mode, you can provide project-level isolation for pods and services.

Using network policies, you can isolate pods from each other in the same project. Network policies can deny all network access to a pod, only allow connections for the ingress controller, reject connections from pods in other projects, or set similar rules for how networks behave.

Each running container has only one network interface by default. The Multus CNI plugin lets you create multiple CNI networks, and then attach any of those networks to your pods. In that way, you can do things like separate private data onto a more restricted network and have multiple network interfaces on each node.

OpenShift Container Platform enables you to segment network traffic on a single cluster to make multitenant clusters that isolate users, teams, applications, and environments from non-global resources.

There are many security implications related to how you configure access to your Kubernetes services from outside of your OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Besides exposing HTTP and HTTPS routes, ingress routing allows you to set up NodePort or LoadBalancer ingress types. NodePort exposes an application’s service API object from each cluster worker. LoadBalancer lets you assign an external load balancer to an associated service API object in your OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

OpenShift Container Platform provides the ability to control egress traffic using either a router or firewall method. For example, you can use IP whitelisting to control database access. A cluster administrator can assign one or more egress IP addresses to a project in an OpenShift Container Platform SDN network provider. Likewise, a cluster administrator can prevent egress traffic from going outside of an OpenShift Container Platform cluster using an egress firewall.

By assigning a fixed egress IP address, you can have all outgoing traffic assigned to that IP address for a particular project. With the egress firewall, you can prevent a pod from connecting to an external network, prevent a pod from connecting to an internal network, or limit a pod’s access to specific internal subnets.

Containers are useful for both stateless and stateful applications. Protecting attached storage is a key element of securing stateful services. Using the Container Storage Interface (CSI), OpenShift Container Platform can incorporate storage from any storage back end that supports the CSI interface.

OpenShift Container Platform provides plugins for multiple types of storage, including:

Plugins for those storage types with dynamic provisioning are marked with an asterisk (*). Data in transit is encrypted via HTTPS for all OpenShift Container Platform components communicating with each other.

You can mount a persistent volume (PV) on a host in any way supported by your storage type. Different types of storage have different capabilities and each PV’s access modes are set to the specific modes supported by that particular volume.

For example, NFS can support multiple read/write clients, but a specific NFS PV might be exported on the server as read-only. Each PV has its own set of access modes describing that specific PV’s capabilities, such as ReadWriteOnce, ReadOnlyMany, and ReadWriteMany.

For shared storage providers like NFS, the PV registers its group ID (GID) as an annotation on the PV resource. Then, when the PV is claimed by the pod, the annotated GID is added to the supplemental groups of the pod, giving that pod access to the contents of the shared storage.

For block storage providers like AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS), GCE Persistent Disks, and iSCSI, OpenShift Container Platform uses SELinux capabilities to secure the root of the mounted volume for non-privileged pods, making the mounted volume owned by and only visible to the container with which it is associated.

Cluster administrators are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the Event resource type and review the list of system events to determine which events are of interest. Events are associated with a namespace, either the namespace of the resource they are related to or, for cluster events, the default namespace. The default namespace holds relevant events for monitoring or auditing a cluster, such as node events and resource events related to infrastructure components.

The master API and oc command do not provide parameters to scope a listing of events to only those related to nodes. A simple approach would be to use grep:

$ oc get event -n default | grep Node

1h         20h         3         origin-node-1.example.local   Node      Normal    NodeHasDiskPressure   ...

A more flexible approach is to output the events in a form that other tools can process. For example, the following example uses the jq tool against JSON output to extract only NodeHasDiskPressure events:

$ oc get events -n default -o json \
  | jq '.items[] | select(.involvedObject.kind == "Node" and .reason == "NodeHasDiskPressure")'

{
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "count": 3,
  "involvedObject": {
    "kind": "Node",
    "name": "origin-node-1.example.local",
    "uid": "origin-node-1.example.local"
  },
  "kind": "Event",
  "reason": "NodeHasDiskPressure",
  ...
}

Events related to resource creation, modification, or deletion can also be good candidates for detecting misuse of the cluster. The following query, for example, can be used to look for excessive pulling of images:

$ oc get events --all-namespaces -o json \
  | jq '[.items[] | select(.involvedObject.kind == "Pod" and .reason == "Pulling")] | length'

4

Using the oc log command, you can view container logs, build configs and deployments in real time. Different can users have access different access to logs:

To save your logs for further audit and analysis, you can enable the cluster-logging add-on feature to collect, manage, and view system, container, and audit logs. You can deploy, manage, and upgrade OpenShift Logging through the OpenShift Elasticsearch Operator and Red Hat OpenShift Logging Operator.

With audit logs, you can follow a sequence of activities associated with how a user, administrator, or other OpenShift Container Platform component is behaving. API audit logging is done on each server.

By default, OpenShift Container Platform uses the Ingress Operator to create an internal CA and issue a wildcard certificate that is valid for applications under the .apps sub-domain. Both the web console and CLI use this certificate as well.

The internal infrastructure CA certificates are self-signed. While this process might be perceived as bad practice by some security or PKI teams, any risk here is minimal. The only clients that implicitly trust these certificates are other components within the cluster. Replacing the default wildcard certificate with one that is issued by a public CA already included in the CA bundle as provided by the container userspace allows external clients to connect securely to applications running under the .apps sub-domain.

You can replace the default ingress certificate for all applications under the .apps subdomain. After you replace the certificate, all applications, including the web console and CLI, will have encryption provided by specified certificate.

Additional resources

The default API server certificate is issued by an internal OpenShift Container Platform cluster CA. You can add one or more alternative certificates that the API server will return based on the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) requested by the client, for example when a reverse proxy or load balancer is used.

Service serving certificates are intended to support complex middleware applications that require encryption. These certificates are issued as TLS web server certificates.

The service-ca controller uses the x509.SHA256WithRSA signature algorithm to generate service certificates.

The generated certificate and key are in PEM format, stored in tls.crt and tls.key respectively, within a created secret. The certificate and key are automatically replaced when they get close to expiration.

The service CA certificate, which issues the service certificates, is valid for 26 months and is automatically rotated when there is less than 13 months validity left. After rotation, the previous service CA configuration is still trusted until its expiration. This allows a grace period for all affected services to refresh their key material before the expiration. If you do not upgrade your cluster during this grace period, which restarts services and refreshes their key material, you might need to manually restart services to avoid failures after the previous service CA expires.

$ for I in $(oc get ns -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]} {.metadata.name}{"\n"} {end}'); \
      do oc delete pods --all -n $I; \
      sleep 1; \
      done

To secure communication to your service, generate a signed serving certificate and key pair into a secret in the same namespace as the service.

The generated certificate is only valid for the internal service DNS name <service.name>.<service.namespace>.svc, and is only valid for internal communications. If your service is a headless service (no clusterIP value set), the generated certificate also contains a wildcard subject in the format of *.<service.name>.<service.namespace>.svc.

A pod can access the service CA certificate by mounting a ConfigMap object that is annotated with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle=true. Once annotated, the cluster automatically injects the service CA certificate into the service-ca.crt key on the config map. Access to this CA certificate allows TLS clients to verify connections to services using service serving certificates.

You can annotate an APIService object with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle=true to have its spec.caBundle field populated with the service CA bundle. This allows the Kubernetes API server to validate the service CA certificate used to secure the targeted endpoint.

You can annotate a CustomResourceDefinition (CRD) object with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle=true to have its spec.conversion.webhook.clientConfig.caBundle field populated with the service CA bundle. This allows the Kubernetes API server to validate the service CA certificate used to secure the targeted endpoint.

You can annotate a MutatingWebhookConfiguration object with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle=true to have the clientConfig.caBundle field of each webhook populated with the service CA bundle. This allows the Kubernetes API server to validate the service CA certificate used to secure the targeted endpoint.

You can annotate a ValidatingWebhookConfiguration object with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle=true to have the clientConfig.caBundle field of each webhook populated with the service CA bundle. This allows the Kubernetes API server to validate the service CA certificate used to secure the targeted endpoint.

You can rotate the service certificate by deleting the associated secret. Deleting the secret results in a new one being automatically created, resulting in a new certificate.

The service CA is valid for 26 months and is automatically refreshed when there is less than 13 months validity left.

If necessary, you can manually refresh the service CA by using the following procedure.

Proxy certificates allow users to specify one or more custom certificate authority (CA) used by platform components when making egress connections.

The trustedCA field of the Proxy object is a reference to a config map that contains a user-provided trusted certificate authority (CA) bundle. This bundle is merged with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) trust bundle and injected into the trust store of platform components that make egress HTTPS calls. For example, image-registry-operator calls an external image registry to download images. If trustedCA is not specified, only the RHCOS trust bundle is used for proxied HTTPS connections. Provide custom CA certificates to the RHCOS trust bundle if you want to use your own certificate infrastructure.

The trustedCA field should only be consumed by a proxy validator. The validator is responsible for reading the certificate bundle from required key ca-bundle.crt and copying it to a config map named trusted-ca-bundle in the openshift-config-managed namespace. The namespace for the config map referenced by trustedCA is openshift-config:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: user-ca-bundle
  namespace: openshift-config
data:
  ca-bundle.crt: |
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    Custom CA certificate bundle.
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----

Additional resources

The API server is accessible by clients external to the cluster at api.<cluster_name>.<base_domain>. You might want clients to access the API server at a different hostname or without the need to distribute the cluster-managed certificate authority (CA) certificates to the clients. The administrator must set a custom default certificate to be used by the API server when serving content.

The user-provided certificates must be provided in a kubernetes.io/tls type Secret in the openshift-config namespace. Update the API server cluster configuration, the apiserver/cluster resource, to enable the use of the user-provided certificate.

User-provided certificates are managed by the user.

API server client certificate expiration is less than five minutes.

User-provided certificates are managed by the user.

Update the secret containing the user-managed certificate as needed.

Additional resources

Proxy certificates allow users to specify one or more custom certificate authority (CA) certificates used by platform components when making egress connections.

The trustedCA field of the Proxy object is a reference to a config map that contains a user-provided trusted certificate authority (CA) bundle. This bundle is merged with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) trust bundle and injected into the trust store of platform components that make egress HTTPS calls. For example, image-registry-operator calls an external image registry to download images. If trustedCA is not specified, only the RHCOS trust bundle is used for proxied HTTPS connections. Provide custom CA certificates to the RHCOS trust bundle if you want to use your own certificate infrastructure.

The trustedCA field should only be consumed by a proxy validator. The validator is responsible for reading the certificate bundle from required key ca-bundle.crt and copying it to a config map named trusted-ca-bundle in the openshift-config-managed namespace. The namespace for the config map referenced by trustedCA is openshift-config:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: user-ca-bundle
  namespace: openshift-config
data:
  ca-bundle.crt: |
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    Custom CA certificate bundle.
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----

Additional resources

The additionalTrustBundle value of the installer configuration is used to specify any proxy-trusted CA certificates during installation. For example:

$ cat install-config.yaml

...
proxy:
  httpProxy: http://<https://username:password@proxy.example.com:123/>
  httpsProxy: https://<https://username:password@proxy.example.com:123/>
	noProxy: <123.example.com,10.88.0.0/16>
additionalTrustBundle: |
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
   <MY_HTTPS_PROXY_TRUSTED_CA_CERT>
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----
...

The user-provided trust bundle is represented as a config map. The config map is mounted into the file system of platform components that make egress HTTPS calls. Typically, Operators mount the config map to /etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/pem/tls-ca-bundle.pem, but this is not required by the proxy. A proxy can modify or inspect the HTTPS connection. In either case, the proxy must generate and sign a new certificate for the connection.

Complete proxy support means connecting to the specified proxy and trusting any signatures it has generated. Therefore, it is necessary to let the user specify a trusted root, such that any certificate chain connected to that trusted root is also trusted.

If using the RHCOS trust bundle, place CA certificates in /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors.

See Using shared system certificates in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation for more information.

The user sets the expiration term of the user-provided trust bundle.

The default expiration term is defined by the CA certificate itself. It is up to the CA administrator to configure this for the certificate before it can be used by OpenShift Container Platform or RHCOS.

By default, all platform components that make egress HTTPS calls will use the RHCOS trust bundle. If trustedCA is defined, it will also be used.

Any service that is running on the RHCOS node is able to use the trust bundle of the node.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

Updating the user-provided trust bundle consists of either:

The mechanism for writing CA certificates to the RHCOS trust bundle is exactly the same as writing any other file to RHCOS, which is done through the use of machine configs. When the Machine Config Operator (MCO) applies the new machine config that contains the new CA certificates, the node is rebooted. During the next boot, the service coreos-update-ca-trust.service runs on the RHCOS nodes, which automatically update the trust bundle with the new CA certificates. For example:

apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: MachineConfig
metadata:
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
  name: 50-examplecorp-ca-cert
spec:
  config:
    ignition:
      version: 3.1.0
    storage:
      files:
      - contents:
          source: data:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,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
        mode: 0644
        overwrite: true
        path: /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/examplecorp-ca.crt

The trust store of machines must also support updating the trust store of nodes.

There are no Operators that can auto-renew certificates on the RHCOS nodes.

service-ca is an Operator that creates a self-signed CA when an OpenShift Container Platform cluster is deployed.

A custom expiration term is not supported. The self-signed CA is stored in a secret with qualified name service-ca/signing-key in fields tls.crt (certificate(s)), tls.key (private key), and ca-bundle.crt (CA bundle).

Other services can request a service serving certificate by annotating a service resource with service.beta.openshift.io/serving-cert-secret-name: <secret name>. In response, the Operator generates a new certificate, as tls.crt, and private key, as tls.key to the named secret. The certificate is valid for two years.

Other services can request that the CA bundle for the service CA be injected into API service or config map resources by annotating with service.beta.openshift.io/inject-cabundle: true to support validating certificates generated from the service CA. In response, the Operator writes its current CA bundle to the CABundle field of an API service or as service-ca.crt to a config map.

As of OpenShift Container Platform 4.3.5, automated rotation is supported and is backported to some 4.2.z and 4.3.z releases. For any release supporting automated rotation, the service CA is valid for 26 months and is automatically refreshed when there is less than 13 months validity left. If necessary, you can manually refresh the service CA.

The service CA expiration of 26 months is longer than the expected upgrade interval for a supported OpenShift Container Platform cluster, such that non-control plane consumers of service CA certificates will be refreshed after CA rotation and prior to the expiration of the pre-rotation CA.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

Services that use service CA certificates include:

This is not a comprehensive list.

Additional resources

Node certificates are signed by the cluster; they come from a certificate authority (CA) that is generated by the bootstrap process. After the cluster is installed, the node certificates are auto-rotated.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

Additional resources

The kubelet, in OpenShift Container Platform 4 and later, uses the bootstrap certificate located in /etc/kubernetes/kubeconfig to initially bootstrap. This is followed by the bootstrap initialization process and authorization of the kubelet to create a CSR.

In that process, the kubelet generates a CSR while communicating over the bootstrap channel. The controller manager signs the CSR, resulting in a certificate that the kubelet manages.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

This bootstrap CA is valid for 10 years.

The kubelet-managed certificate is valid for one year and rotates automatically at around the 80 percent mark of that one year.

You cannot customize the bootstrap certificates.

etcd certificates are signed by the etcd-signer; they come from a certificate authority (CA) that is generated by the bootstrap process.

The CA certificates are valid for 10 years. The peer, client, and server certificates are valid for three years.

These certificates are only managed by the system and are automatically rotated.

etcd certificates are used for encrypted communication between etcd member peers, as well as encrypted client traffic. The following certificates are generated and used by etcd and other processes that communicate with etcd:

Additional resources

All certificates for OpenShift Lifecycle Manager (OLM) components (olm-operator, catalog-operator, packageserver, and marketplace-operator) are managed by the system.

When installing Operators that include webhooks or API services in their ClusterServiceVersion (CSV) object, OLM creates and rotates the certificates for these resources. Certificates for resources in the openshift-operator-lifecycle-manager namespace are managed by OLM.

OLM will not update the certificates of Operators that it manages in proxy environments. These certificates must be managed by the user using the subscription config.

Aggregated API client certificates are used to authenticate the KubeAPIServer when connecting to the Aggregated API Servers.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

This CA is valid for 30 days.

The managed client certificates are valid for 30 days.

CA and client certificates are rotated automatically through the use of controllers.

You cannot customize the aggregated API server certificates.

Machine Config Operator certificates are used to secure connections between the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) nodes and the Machine Config Server.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

This CA is valid for 10 years.

The issued serving certificates are valid for 10 years.

You cannot customize the Machine Config Operator certificates.

Applications are usually exposed at <route_name>.apps.<cluster_name>.<base_domain>. The <cluster_name> and <base_domain> come from the installation config file. <route_name> is the host field of the route, if specified, or the route name. For example, hello-openshift-default.apps.username.devcluster.openshift.com. hello-openshift is the name of the route and the route is in the default namespace. You might want clients to access the applications without the need to distribute the cluster-managed CA certificates to the clients. The administrator must set a custom default certificate when serving application content.

The user-provided certificates must be provided in a tls type Secret resource in the openshift-ingress namespace. Update the IngressController CR in the openshift-ingress-operator namespace to enable the use of the user-provided certificate. For more information on this process, see Setting a custom default certificate.

User-provided certificates are managed by the user.

User-provided certificates are managed by the user.

Applications deployed on the cluster use user-provided certificates for default ingress.

Update the secret containing the user-managed certificate as needed.

Additional resources

The Ingress Operator uses certificates for:

To secure access to Ingress Operator and Ingress Controller metrics, the Ingress Operator uses service serving certificates. The Operator requests a certificate from the service-ca controller for its own metrics, and the service-ca controller puts the certificate in a secret named metrics-tls in the openshift-ingress-operator namespace. Additionally, the Ingress Operator requests a certificate for each Ingress Controller, and the service-ca controller puts the certificate in a secret named router-metrics-certs-<name>, where <name> is the name of the Ingress Controller, in the openshift-ingress namespace.

Each Ingress Controller has a default certificate that it uses for secured routes that do not specify their own certificates. Unless you specify a custom certificate, the Operator uses a self-signed certificate by default. The Operator uses its own self-signed signing certificate to sign any default certificate that it generates. The Operator generates this signing certificate and puts it in a secret named router-ca in the openshift-ingress-operator namespace. When the Operator generates a default certificate, it puts the default certificate in a secret named router-certs-<name> (where <name> is the name of the Ingress Controller) in the openshift-ingress namespace.

An empty defaultCertificate field causes the Ingress Operator to use its self-signed CA to generate a serving certificate for the specified domain.

The default CA certificate and key generated by the Ingress Operator. Used to sign Operator-generated default serving certificates.

In the default workflow, the wildcard default serving certificate, created by the Ingress Operator and signed using the generated default CA certificate. In the custom workflow, this is the user-provided certificate.

The router deployment. Uses the certificate in secrets/router-certs-default as its default front-end server certificate.

In the default workflow, the contents of the wildcard default serving certificate (public and private parts) are copied here to enable OAuth integration. In the custom workflow, this is the user-provided certificate.

The public (certificate) part of the default serving certificate. Replaces the configmaps/router-ca resource.

The user updates the cluster proxy configuration with the CA certificate that signed the ingresscontroller serving certificate. This enables components like auth, console, and the registry to trust the serving certificate.

The cluster-wide trusted CA bundle containing the combined Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) and user-provided CA bundles or an RHCOS-only bundle if a user bundle is not provided.

The custom CA certificate bundle, which instructs other components (for example, auth and console) to trust an ingresscontroller configured with a custom certificate.

The trustedCA field is used to reference the user-provided CA bundle.

The Cluster Network Operator injects the trusted CA bundle into the proxy-ca config map.

OpenShift Container Platform 4.9 and newer use default-ingress-cert.

The expiration terms for the Ingress Operator’s certificates are as follows:

You cannot specify custom expiration terms on certificates that the Ingress Operator or service-ca controller creates.

You cannot specify expiration terms when installing OpenShift Container Platform for certificates that the Ingress Operator or service-ca controller creates.

Prometheus uses the certificates that secure metrics.

The Ingress Operator uses its signing certificate to sign default certificates that it generates for Ingress Controllers for which you do not set custom default certificates.

Cluster components that use secured routes may use the default Ingress Controller’s default certificate.

Ingress to the cluster via a secured route uses the default certificate of the Ingress Controller by which the route is accessed unless the route specifies its own certificate.

Ingress certificates are managed by the user. See Replacing the default ingress certificate for more information.

The service-ca controller automatically rotates the certificates that it issues. However, it is possible to use oc delete secret <secret> to manually rotate service serving certificates.

The Ingress Operator does not rotate its own signing certificate or the default certificates that it generates. Operator-generated default certificates are intended as placeholders for custom default certificates that you configure.

Monitoring components secure their traffic with service CA certificates. These certificates are valid for 2 years and are replaced automatically on rotation of the service CA, which is every 13 months.

If the certificate lives in the openshift-monitoring or openshift-logging namespace, it is system managed and rotated automatically.

These certificates are managed by the system and not the user.

Control plane certificates are included in these namespaces:

Control plane certificates are managed by the system and rotated automatically.

In the rare case that your control plane certificates have expired, see Recovering from expired control plane certificates.

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 1.0.0:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.61:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.59:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.57:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.53:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.52:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.49:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.48:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.47:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.44:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift Compliance Operator 0.1.39:

The Compliance Operator provides the following compliance profiles:

If the Operator is not installed successfully:

The subscription of an installed Operator specifies an update channel that tracks and receives updates for the Operator. You can change the update channel to start tracking and receiving updates from a newer channel.

The names of update channels in a subscription can differ between Operators, but the naming scheme typically follows a common convention within a given Operator. For example, channel names might follow a minor release update stream for the application provided by the Operator (1.2, 1.3) or a release frequency (stable, fast).

Red Hat Customer Portal Labs include the following application that helps administrators prepare to update their Operators:

You can use the application to search for Operator Lifecycle Manager-based Operators and verify the available Operator version per update channel across different versions of OpenShift Container Platform. Cluster Version Operator-based Operators are not included.

You can change the update channel for an Operator by using the OpenShift Container Platform web console.

If an installed Operator has the approval strategy in its subscription set to Manual, when new updates are released in its current update channel, the update must be manually approved before installation can begin.

You can run a scan using the Center for Internet Security (CIS) profiles. For convenience, the Compliance Operator creates a ScanSetting object with reasonable defaults on startup. This ScanSetting object is named default.

The result server pod mounts the persistent volume (PV) that stores the raw Asset Reporting Format (ARF) scan results. The nodeSelector and tolerations attributes enable you to configure the location of the result server pod.

This is helpful for those environments where control plane nodes are not permitted to mount persistent volumes.

The ScanSetting Custom Resource now allows you to override the default CPU and memory limits of scanner pods through the scan limits attribute. The Compliance Operator will use defaults of 500Mi memory, 100m CPU for the scanner container, and 200Mi memory with 100m CPU for the api-resource-collector container. To set the memory limits of the Operator, modify the Subscription object if installed through OLM or the Operator deployment itself.

To increase the default CPU and memory limits of the Compliance Operator, see Increasing Compliance Operator resource limits.

When the kubelet starts a container as part of a Pod, the kubelet passes that container’s requests and limits for memory and CPU to the container runtime. In Linux, the container runtime configures the kernel cgroups that apply and enforce the limits you defined.

The CPU limit defines how much CPU time the container can use. During each scheduling interval, the Linux kernel checks to see if this limit is exceeded. If so, the kernel waits before allowing the cgroup to resume execution.

If several different containers (cgroups) want to run on a contended system, workloads with larger CPU requests are allocated more CPU time than workloads with small requests. The memory request is used during Pod scheduling. On a node that uses cgroups v2, the container runtime might use the memory request as a hint to set memory.min and memory.low values.

If a container attempts to allocate more memory than this limit, the Linux kernel out-of-memory subsystem activates and intervenes by stopping one of the processes in the container that tried to allocate memory. The memory limit for the Pod or container can also apply to pages in memory-backed volumes, such as an emptyDir.

The kubelet tracks tmpfs emptyDir volumes as container memory is used, rather than as local ephemeral storage. If a container exceeds its memory request and the node that it runs on becomes short of memory overall, the Pod’s container might be evicted.

When a Pod is created, the scheduler selects a Node for the Pod to run on. Each node has a maximum capacity for each resource type in the amount of CPU and memory it can provide for the Pods. The scheduler ensures that the sum of the resource requests of the scheduled containers is less than the capacity nodes for each resource type.

Although memory or CPU resource usage on nodes is very low, the scheduler might still refuse to place a Pod on a node if the capacity check fails to protect against a resource shortage on a node.

For each container, you can specify the following resource limits and request:

spec.containers[].resources.limits.cpu
spec.containers[].resources.limits.memory
spec.containers[].resources.limits.hugepages-<size>
spec.containers[].resources.requests.cpu
spec.containers[].resources.requests.memory
spec.containers[].resources.requests.hugepages-<size>

Although you can specify requests and limits for only individual containers, it is also useful to consider the overall resource requests and limits for a pod. For a particular resource, a container resource request or limit is the sum of the resource requests or limits of that type for each container in the pod.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: images.my-company.example/app:v4
    resources:
      requests: 1
        memory: "64Mi"
        cpu: "250m"
      limits: 2
        memory: "128Mi"
        cpu: "500m"
  - name: log-aggregator
    image: images.my-company.example/log-aggregator:v6
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "64Mi"
        cpu: "250m"
      limits:
        memory: "128Mi"
        cpu: "500m"

There are several profiles available as part of the Compliance Operator installation. You can use the oc get command to view available profiles, profile details, and specific rules.

The ProfileBundle object requires two pieces of information: the URL of a container image that contains the contentImage and the file that contains the compliance content. The contentFile parameter is relative to the root of the file system. You can define the built-in rhcos4 ProfileBundle object as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ProfileBundle
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2022-10-19T12:06:30Z"
  finalizers:
  - profilebundle.finalizers.compliance.openshift.io
  generation: 1
  name: rhcos4
  namespace: openshift-compliance
  resourceVersion: "46741"
  uid: 22350850-af4a-4f5c-9a42-5e7b68b82d7d
spec:
  contentFile: ssg-rhcos4-ds.xml 1
  contentImage: registry.redhat.io/compliance/openshift-compliance-content-rhel8@sha256:900e... 2
status:
  conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: "2022-10-19T12:07:51Z"
    message: Profile bundle successfully parsed
    reason: Valid
    status: "True"
    type: Ready
  dataStreamStatus: VALID

Security content is included as container images that the ProfileBundle objects refer to. To accurately track updates to ProfileBundles and the custom resources parsed from the bundles such as rules or profiles, identify the container image with the compliance content using a digest instead of a tag:

$ oc -n openshift-compliance get profilebundles rhcos4 -oyaml

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ProfileBundle
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2022-10-19T12:06:30Z"
  finalizers:
  - profilebundle.finalizers.compliance.openshift.io
  generation: 1
  name: rhcos4
  namespace: openshift-compliance
  resourceVersion: "46741"
  uid: 22350850-af4a-4f5c-9a42-5e7b68b82d7d
spec:
  contentFile: ssg-rhcos4-ds.xml
  contentImage: registry.redhat.io/compliance/openshift-compliance-content-rhel8@sha256:900e... 1
status:
  conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: "2022-10-19T12:07:51Z"
    message: Profile bundle successfully parsed
    reason: Valid
    status: "True"
    type: Ready
  dataStreamStatus: VALID

Each ProfileBundle is backed by a deployment. When the Compliance Operator detects that the container image digest has changed, the deployment is updated to reflect the change and parse the content again. Using the digest instead of a tag ensures that you use a stable and predictable set of profiles.

You can write a tailored profile from scratch using the TailoredProfile object. Set an appropriate title and description and leave the extends field empty. Indicate to the Compliance Operator what type of scan will this custom profile generate:

+ .Example new-profile.yaml

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: TailoredProfile
metadata:
  name: new-profile
  annotations:
    compliance.openshift.io/product-type: Node 1
spec:
  extends:
  description: My custom profile 2
  title: Custom profile 3

While the TailoredProfile CR enables the most common tailoring operations, the XCCDF standard allows even more flexibility in tailoring OpenSCAP profiles. In addition, if your organization has been using OpenScap previously, you may have an existing XCCDF tailoring file and can reuse it.

The ComplianceSuite object contains an optional TailoringConfigMap attribute that you can point to a custom tailoring file. The value of the TailoringConfigMap attribute is a name of a config map, which must contain a key called tailoring.xml and the value of this key is the tailoring contents.

By default, the ComplianceCheckResult objects are labeled with several useful labels that allow you to query the checks and decide on the next steps after the results are generated.

List checks that belong to a specific suite:

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance compliancecheckresults \
  -l compliance.openshift.io/suite=workers-compliancesuite

List checks that belong to a specific scan:

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance compliancecheckresults \
-l compliance.openshift.io/scan=workers-scan

Not all ComplianceCheckResult objects create ComplianceRemediation objects. Only ComplianceCheckResult objects that can be remediated automatically do. A ComplianceCheckResult object has a related remediation if it is labeled with the compliance.openshift.io/automated-remediation label. The name of the remediation is the same as the name of the check.

List all failing checks that can be remediated automatically:

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance compliancecheckresults \
-l 'compliance.openshift.io/check-status=FAIL,compliance.openshift.io/automated-remediation'

List all failing checks sorted by severity:

$ oc get compliancecheckresults -n openshift-compliance \
-l 'compliance.openshift.io/check-status=FAIL,compliance.openshift.io/check-severity=high'

NAME                                                           STATUS   SEVERITY
nist-moderate-modified-master-configure-crypto-policy          FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-coreos-pti-kernel-argument       FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-disable-ctrlaltdel-burstaction   FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-disable-ctrlaltdel-reboot        FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-enable-fips-mode                 FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-no-empty-passwords               FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-master-selinux-state                    FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-configure-crypto-policy          FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-coreos-pti-kernel-argument       FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-disable-ctrlaltdel-burstaction   FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-disable-ctrlaltdel-reboot        FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-enable-fips-mode                 FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-no-empty-passwords               FAIL     high
nist-moderate-modified-worker-selinux-state                    FAIL     high
ocp4-moderate-configure-network-policies-namespaces            FAIL     high
ocp4-moderate-fips-mode-enabled-on-all-nodes                   FAIL     high

List all failing checks that must be remediated manually:

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance compliancecheckresults \
-l 'compliance.openshift.io/check-status=FAIL,!compliance.openshift.io/automated-remediation'

The manual remediation steps are typically stored in the description attribute in the ComplianceCheckResult object.

Review both the ComplianceRemediation object and the ComplianceCheckResult object that owns the remediation. The ComplianceCheckResult object contains human-readable descriptions of what the check does and the hardening trying to prevent, as well as other metadata like the severity and the associated security controls. The ComplianceRemediation object represents a way to fix the problem described in the ComplianceCheckResult. After first scan, check for remediations with the state MissingDependencies.

Below is an example of a check and a remediation called sysctl-net-ipv4-conf-all-accept-redirects. This example is redacted to only show spec and status and omits metadata:

spec:
  apply: false
  current:
  object:
    apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
    kind: MachineConfig
    spec:
      config:
        ignition:
          version: 3.2.0
        storage:
          files:
            - path: /etc/sysctl.d/75-sysctl_net_ipv4_conf_all_accept_redirects.conf
              mode: 0644
              contents:
                source: data:,net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects%3D0
  outdated: {}
status:
  applicationState: NotApplied

The remediation payload is stored in the spec.current attribute. The payload can be any Kubernetes object, but because this remediation was produced by a node scan, the remediation payload in the above example is a MachineConfig object. For Platform scans, the remediation payload is often a different kind of an object (for example, a ConfigMap or Secret object), but typically applying that remediation is up to the administrator, because otherwise the Compliance Operator would have required a very broad set of permissions to manipulate any generic Kubernetes object. An example of remediating a Platform check is provided later in the text.

To see exactly what the remediation does when applied, the MachineConfig object contents use the Ignition objects for the configuration. See the Ignition specification for further information about the format. In our example, the spec.config.storage.files[0].path attribute specifies the file that is being create by this remediation (/etc/sysctl.d/75-sysctl_net_ipv4_conf_all_accept_redirects.conf) and the spec.config.storage.files[0].contents.source attribute specifies the contents of that file.

Use the following Python script to view the contents:

$ echo "net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects%3D0" | python3 -c "import sys, urllib.parse; print(urllib.parse.unquote(''.join(sys.stdin.readlines())))"

net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects=0

When you create a custom MachineConfigPool, add a label to the MachineConfigPool so that machineConfigPoolSelector present in the KubeletConfig can match the label with MachineConfigPool.

OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure might contain incomplete configuration files at run time, and nodes assume default configuration values for missing configuration options. Some configuration options can be passed as command line arguments. As a result, the Compliance Operator cannot verify if the configuration file on the node is complete because it might be missing options used in the rule checks.

To prevent false negative results where the default configuration value passes a check, the Compliance Operator uses the Node/Proxy API to fetch the configuration for each node in a node pool, then all configuration options that are consistent across nodes in the node pool are stored in a file that represents the configuration for all nodes within that node pool. This increases the accuracy of the scan results.

No additional configuration changes are required to use this feature with default master and worker node pools configurations.

The Compliance Operator does not maintain a copy of each node pool configuration. The Compliance Operator aggregates consistent configuration options for all nodes within a single node pool into one copy of the configuration file. The Compliance Operator then uses the configuration file for a particular node pool to evaluate rules against nodes within that pool.

If your cluster uses custom node pools outside the default worker and master node pools, you must supply additional variables to ensure the Compliance Operator aggregates a configuration file for that node pool.

The Compliance Operator checks the runtime KubeletConfig through the Node/Proxy API object and then uses variables such as ocp-var-role-master and ocp-var-role-worker to determine the nodes it performs the check against. In the ComplianceCheckResult, the KubeletConfig rules are shown as ocp4-cis-kubelet-*. The scan passes only if all selected nodes pass this check.

KubeletConfig remediation labels can be applied to MachineConfigPool sub-pools.

The boolean attribute spec.apply controls whether the remediation should be applied by the Compliance Operator. You can apply the remediation by setting the attribute to true:

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
patch complianceremediations/<scan-name>-sysctl-net-ipv4-conf-all-accept-redirects \
--patch '{"spec":{"apply":true}}' --type=merge

After the Compliance Operator processes the applied remediation, the status.ApplicationState attribute would change to Applied or to Error if incorrect. When a machine config remediation is applied, that remediation along with all other applied remediations are rendered into a MachineConfig object named 75-$scan-name-$suite-name. That MachineConfig object is subsequently rendered by the Machine Config Operator and finally applied to all the nodes in a machine config pool by an instance of the machine control daemon running on each node.

Note that when the Machine Config Operator applies a new MachineConfig object to nodes in a pool, all the nodes belonging to the pool are rebooted. This might be inconvenient when applying multiple remediations, each of which re-renders the composite 75-$scan-name-$suite-name MachineConfig object. To prevent applying the remediation immediately, you can pause the machine config pool by setting the .spec.paused attribute of a MachineConfigPool object to true.

The Compliance Operator can apply remediations automatically. Set autoApplyRemediations: true in the ScanSetting top-level object.

Checks for Platform scans typically have to be remediated manually by the administrator for two reasons:

When a new version of compliance content is used, it might deliver a new and different version of a remediation than the previous version. The Compliance Operator will keep the old version of the remediation applied. The OpenShift Container Platform administrator is also notified of the new version to review and apply. A ComplianceRemediation object that had been applied earlier, but was updated changes its status to Outdated. The outdated objects are labeled so that they can be searched for easily.

The previously applied remediation contents would then be stored in the spec.outdated attribute of a ComplianceRemediation object and the new updated contents would be stored in the spec.current attribute. After updating the content to a newer version, the administrator then needs to review the remediation. As long as the spec.outdated attribute exists, it would be used to render the resulting MachineConfig object. After the spec.outdated attribute is removed, the Compliance Operator re-renders the resulting MachineConfig object, which causes the Operator to push the configuration to the nodes.

It might be required to unapply a remediation that was previously applied.

KubeletConfig remediations are included in node-level profiles. In order to remove a KubeletConfig remediation, you must manually remove it from the KubeletConfig objects. This example demonstrates how to remove the compliance check for the one-rule-tp-node-master-kubelet-eviction-thresholds-set-hard-imagefs-available remediation.

The ScanSetting object lists the node roles that the compliance scans generated from the ScanSetting or ScanSettingBinding objects would scan. Each node role usually maps to a machine config pool.

If some of the results are different from others, the Compliance Operator flags a ComplianceCheckResult object where some of the nodes will report as INCONSISTENT. All ComplianceCheckResult objects are also labeled with compliance.openshift.io/inconsistent-check.

Because the number of machines in a pool might be quite large, the Compliance Operator attempts to find the most common state and list the nodes that differ from the common state. The most common state is stored in the compliance.openshift.io/most-common-status annotation and the annotation compliance.openshift.io/inconsistent-source contains pairs of hostname:status of check statuses that differ from the most common status. If no common state can be found, all the hostname:status pairs are listed in the compliance.openshift.io/inconsistent-source annotation.

If possible, a remediation is still created so that the cluster can converge to a compliant status. However, this might not always be possible and correcting the difference between nodes must be done manually. The compliance scan must be re-run to get a consistent result by annotating the scan with the compliance.openshift.io/rescan= option:

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancescans/rhcos4-e8-worker compliance.openshift.io/rescan=

While it is recommended that users take advantage of the ScanSetting and ScanSettingBinding objects to define the suites and scans, there are valid use cases to define the ComplianceSuite objects directly:

The following example shows a ComplianceSuite that scans the worker machines with only a single rule:

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ComplianceSuite
metadata:
  name: workers-compliancesuite
spec:
  scans:
    - name: workers-scan
      profile: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_moderate
      content: ssg-rhcos4-ds.xml
      contentImage: quay.io/complianceascode/ocp4:latest
      debug: true
      rule: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_no_direct_root_logins
      nodeSelector:
      node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: ""

The ComplianceSuite object and the ComplianceScan objects referred to above specify several attributes in a format that OpenSCAP expects.

To find out the profile, content, or rule values, you can start by creating a similar Suite from ScanSetting and ScanSettingBinding or inspect the objects parsed from the ProfileBundle objects like rules or profiles. Those objects contain the xccdf_org identifiers you can use to refer to them from a ComplianceSuite.

In large scale environments, the default PriorityClass object can be too low to guarantee Pods execute scans on time. For clusters that must maintain compliance or guarantee automated scanning, it is recommended to set the PriorityClass variable to ensure the Compliance Operator is always given priority in resource constrained situations.

While the TailoredProfile CR enables the most common tailoring operations, the XCCDF standard allows even more flexibility in tailoring OpenSCAP profiles. In addition, if your organization has been using OpenScap previously, you may have an existing XCCDF tailoring file and can reuse it.

The ComplianceSuite object contains an optional TailoringConfigMap attribute that you can point to a custom tailoring file. The value of the TailoringConfigMap attribute is a name of a config map which must contain a key called tailoring.xml and the value of this key is the tailoring contents.

Typically you will want to re-run a scan on a defined schedule, like every Monday or daily. It can also be useful to re-run a scan once after fixing a problem on a node. To perform a single scan, annotate the scan with the compliance.openshift.io/rescan= option:

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancescans/rhcos4-e8-worker compliance.openshift.io/rescan=

A rescan generates four additional mc for rhcos-moderate profile:

$ oc get mc

75-worker-scan-chronyd-or-ntpd-specify-remote-server
75-worker-scan-configure-usbguard-auditbackend
75-worker-scan-service-usbguard-enabled
75-worker-scan-usbguard-allow-hid-and-hub

While the custom resources such as ComplianceCheckResult represent an aggregated result of one check across all scanned nodes, it can be useful to review the raw results as produced by the scanner. The raw results are produced in the ARF format and can be large (tens of megabytes per node), it is impractical to store them in a Kubernetes resource backed by the etcd key-value store. Instead, every scan creates a persistent volume (PV) which defaults to 1GB size. Depending on your environment, you may want to increase the PV size accordingly. This is done using the rawResultStorage.size attribute that is exposed in both the ScanSetting and ComplianceScan resources.

A related parameter is rawResultStorage.rotation which controls how many scans are retained in the PV before the older scans are rotated. The default value is 3, setting the rotation policy to 0 disables the rotation. Given the default rotation policy and an estimate of 100MB per a raw ARF scan report, you can calculate the right PV size for your environment.

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSetting
metadata:
  name: default
  namespace: openshift-compliance
rawResultStorage:
  storageClassName: standard
  rotation: 10
  size: 10Gi
roles:
- worker
- master
scanTolerations:
- effect: NoSchedule
  key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
  operator: Exists
schedule: '0 1 * * *'

Although you can use the autoApplyRemediations boolean parameter in a ComplianceSuite object, you can alternatively annotate the object with compliance.openshift.io/apply-remediations. This allows the Operator to apply all of the created remediations.

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancesuites/workers-compliancesuite compliance.openshift.io/apply-remediations=

In some cases, a scan with newer content might mark remediations as OUTDATED. As an administrator, you can apply the compliance.openshift.io/remove-outdated annotation to apply new remediations and remove the outdated ones.

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancesuites/workers-compliancesuite compliance.openshift.io/remove-outdated=

Alternatively, set the autoUpdateRemediations flag in a ScanSetting or ComplianceSuite object to update the remediations automatically.

In some environments, you must create a custom Security Context Constraints (SCC) file to ensure the correct permissions are available to the Compliance Operator api-resource-collector.

The following sections outline the components and stages of Compliance Operator scans.

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance profilebundle.compliance

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance profile.compliance

$ oc logs -n openshift-compliance -lprofile-bundle=ocp4 -c profileparser

$ oc get -n openshift-compliance deployments,pods -lprofile-bundle=ocp4

$ oc logs -n openshift-compliance pods/<pod-name>

$ oc describe -n openshift-compliance pod/<pod-name> -c profileparser

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSetting
metadata:
  name: my-companys-constraints
debug: true
# For each role, a separate scan will be created pointing
# to a node-role specified in roles
roles:
  - worker
---
apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSettingBinding
metadata:
  name: my-companys-compliance-requirements
profiles:
  # Node checks
  - name: rhcos4-e8
    kind: Profile
    apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
  # Cluster checks
  - name: ocp4-e8
    kind: Profile
    apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
settingsRef:
  name: my-companys-constraints
  kind: ScanSetting
  apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1

Events:
  Type     Reason        Age    From                    Message
  ----     ------        ----   ----                    -------
  Normal   SuiteCreated  9m52s  scansettingbindingctrl  ComplianceSuite openshift-compliance/my-companys-compliance-requirements created

$ oc get cronjobs

NAME                                           SCHEDULE    SUSPEND   ACTIVE   LAST SCHEDULE   AGE
<cron_name>                                    0 1 * * *   False     0        <none>          151m

$ oc -n openshift-compliance get cm \
-l compliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker,complianceoperator.openshift.io/scan-script=

$ oc get pvc -n openshift-compliance -lcompliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker

$ oc get pods -lcompliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker,workload=scanner --show-labels

NAME                                                              READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE   LABELS
rhcos4-e8-worker-ip-10-0-169-90.eu-north-1.compute.internal-pod   0/2     Completed   0          39m   compliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker,targetNode=ip-10-0-169-90.eu-north-1.compute.internal,workload=scanner

$ oc get compliancecheckresults -lcompliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker

NAME                                                       STATUS   SEVERITY
rhcos4-e8-worker-accounts-no-uid-except-zero               PASS     high
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod        FAIL     medium

$ oc get complianceremediations -lcompliance.openshift.io/scan-name=rhcos4-e8-worker

NAME                                                       STATE
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod        NotApplied
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chown        NotApplied
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-execution-chcon               NotApplied
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-execution-restorecon          NotApplied
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-execution-semanage            NotApplied
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-execution-setfiles            NotApplied

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancescans/rhcos4-e8-worker compliance.openshift.io/rescan=

$ oc patch complianceremediations/rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod --patch '{"spec":{"apply":true}}' --type=merge

$ oc get mc | grep 75-

75-rhcos4-e8-worker-my-companys-compliance-requirements                                                3.2.0             2m46s

$ oc describe mc/75-rhcos4-e8-worker-my-companys-compliance-requirements

Name:         75-rhcos4-e8-worker-my-companys-compliance-requirements
Labels:       machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role=worker
Annotations:  remediation/rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod:

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
annotate compliancescans/rhcos4-e8-worker compliance.openshift.io/rescan=

$ oc -n openshift-compliance \
get compliancecheckresults/rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod

NAME                                                  STATUS   SEVERITY
rhcos4-e8-worker-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod   PASS     medium

$ oc logs -l workload=<workload_name> -c <container_name>

In some cases, the Compliance Operator might require more memory than the default limits allow. The best way to mitigate this issue is to set custom resource limits.

To increase the default memory and CPU limits of scanner pods, see `ScanSetting` Custom resource.

The resources field defines Resource Constraints for all the containers in the Pod created by the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM).

The ScanSetting object has a timeout option that can be specified in the ComplianceScanSetting object as a duration string, such as 1h30m. If the scan does not finish within the specified timeout, the scan reattempts until the maxRetryOnTimeout limit is reached.

If you experience difficulty with a procedure described in this documentation, or with OpenShift Container Platform in general, visit the Red Hat Customer Portal. From the Customer Portal, you can:

To identify issues with your cluster, you can use Insights in OpenShift Cluster Manager. Insights provides details about issues and, if available, information on how to solve a problem.

If you have a suggestion for improving this documentation or have found an error, submit a Jira issue for the most relevant documentation component. Please provide specific details, such as the section name and OpenShift Container Platform version.

To remove the Compliance Operator, you must first delete the objects in the namespace. After the objects are removed, you can remove the Operator and its namespace by deleting the openshift-compliance project.

To remove the Compliance Operator, you must first delete the objects in the namespace. After the objects are removed, you can remove the Operator and its namespace by deleting the openshift-compliance project.

When a compliance scan finishes, the results of the individual checks are listed in the resulting ComplianceCheckResult custom resource (CR). However, an administrator or auditor might require the complete details of the scan. The OpenSCAP tool creates an Advanced Recording Format (ARF) formatted file with the detailed results. This ARF file is too large to store in a config map or other standard Kubernetes resource, so a persistent volume (PV) is created to contain it.

View the list of files in the directory:

$ ls /tmp/ocp4-cis-node-master/

ocp4-cis-node-master-ip-10-0-128-89.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2  ocp4-cis-node-master-ip-10-0-150-5.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2  ocp4-cis-node-master-ip-10-0-163-32.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2

Extract the results:

$ bunzip2 -c resultsdir/worker-scan/worker-scan-stage-459-tqkg7-compute-0-pod.xml.bzip2 > resultsdir/worker-scan/worker-scan-ip-10-0-170-231.us-east-2.compute.internal-pod.xml

View the results:

$ ls resultsdir/worker-scan/

worker-scan-ip-10-0-170-231.us-east-2.compute.internal-pod.xml
worker-scan-stage-459-tqkg7-compute-0-pod.xml.bzip2
worker-scan-stage-459-tqkg7-compute-1-pod.xml.bzip2

Although it is possible to run scans as scheduled jobs, you must often re-run a scan on demand, particularly after remediations are applied or when other changes to the cluster are made.

When using the ScanSetting and ScanSettingBinding custom resources (CRs) that the Compliance Operator provides, it is possible to run scans for multiple profiles while using a common set of scan options, such as schedule, machine roles, tolerations, and so on. While that is easier than working with multiple ComplianceSuite or ComplianceScan objects, it can confuse new users.

The oc compliance bind subcommand helps you create a ScanSettingBinding CR.

Compliance standards are generally organized into a hierarchy as follows:

The Compliance Operator provides remediation objects that are used to automate the changes required to make the cluster compliant. The fetch-fixes subcommand can help you understand exactly which configuration remediations are used. Use the fetch-fixes subcommand to extract the remediation objects from a profile, rule, or ComplianceRemediation object into a directory to inspect.

When scans are finished running, ComplianceCheckResult objects are created for the individual scan rules. The view-result subcommand provides a human-readable output of the ComplianceCheckResult object details.

The CRD provides you the following workflow to complete the compliance scans:

By default, the Compliance Operator CRDs include ProfileBundle and Profile objects, in which you can define and set the rules for your compliance scan requirements. You can also customize the default profiles by using a TailoredProfile object.

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ProfileBundle
  name: <profile bundle name>
  namespace: openshift-compliance
status:
  dataStreamStatus: VALID 1

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
description: <description of the profile>
id: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_moderate 1
kind: Profile
metadata:
  annotations:
    compliance.openshift.io/product: <product name>
    compliance.openshift.io/product-type: Node 2
  creationTimestamp: "YYYY-MM-DDTMM:HH:SSZ"
  generation: 1
  labels:
    compliance.openshift.io/profile-bundle: <profile bundle name>
  name: rhcos4-moderate
  namespace: openshift-compliance
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ProfileBundle
    name: <profile bundle name>
    uid: <uid string>
  resourceVersion: "<version number>"
  selfLink: /apis/compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/openshift-compliance/profiles/rhcos4-moderate
  uid: <uid string>
rules: 3
- rhcos4-account-disable-post-pw-expiration
- rhcos4-accounts-no-uid-except-zero
- rhcos4-audit-rules-dac-modification-chmod
- rhcos4-audit-rules-dac-modification-chown
title: <title of the profile>

    apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
    checkType: Platform 1
    description: <description of the rule>
    id: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_configure_network_policies_namespaces 2
    instructions: <manual instructions for the scan>
    kind: Rule
    metadata:
      annotations:
        compliance.openshift.io/rule: configure-network-policies-namespaces
        control.compliance.openshift.io/CIS-OCP: 5.3.2
        control.compliance.openshift.io/NERC-CIP: CIP-003-3 R4;CIP-003-3 R4.2;CIP-003-3
          R5;CIP-003-3 R6;CIP-004-3 R2.2.4;CIP-004-3 R3;CIP-007-3 R2;CIP-007-3 R2.1;CIP-007-3
          R2.2;CIP-007-3 R2.3;CIP-007-3 R5.1;CIP-007-3 R6.1
        control.compliance.openshift.io/NIST-800-53: AC-4;AC-4(21);CA-3(5);CM-6;CM-6(1);CM-7;CM-7(1);SC-7;SC-7(3);SC-7(5);SC-7(8);SC-7(12);SC-7(13);SC-7(18)
      labels:
        compliance.openshift.io/profile-bundle: ocp4
      name: ocp4-configure-network-policies-namespaces
      namespace: openshift-compliance
    rationale: <description of why this rule is checked>
    severity: high 3
    title: <summary of the rule>

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: TailoredProfile
metadata:
  name: rhcos4-with-usb
spec:
  extends: rhcos4-moderate 1
  title: <title of the tailored profile>
  disableRules:
    - name: <name of a rule object to be disabled>
      rationale: <description of why this rule is checked>
status:
  id: xccdf_compliance.openshift.io_profile_rhcos4-with-usb 2
  outputRef:
    name: rhcos4-with-usb-tp 3
    namespace: openshift-compliance
  state: READY 4

After you have defined the requirements of the compliance scan, you can configure it by specifying the type of the scan, occurrence of the scan, and location of the scan. To do so, Compliance Operator provides you with a ScanSetting object.

Name:                      default-auto-apply
Namespace:                 openshift-compliance
Labels:                    <none>
Annotations:               <none>
API Version:               compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
Auto Apply Remediations:   true
Auto Update Remediations:  true
Kind:                      ScanSetting
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2022-10-18T20:21:00Z
  Generation:          1
  Managed Fields:
    API Version:  compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
    Fields Type:  FieldsV1
    fieldsV1:
      f:autoApplyRemediations: 1
      f:autoUpdateRemediations: 2
      f:rawResultStorage:
        .:
        f:nodeSelector:
          .:
          f:node-role.kubernetes.io/master:
        f:pvAccessModes:
        f:rotation:
        f:size:
        f:tolerations:
      f:roles:
      f:scanTolerations:
      f:schedule:
      f:showNotApplicable:
      f:strictNodeScan:
    Manager:         compliance-operator
    Operation:       Update
    Time:            2022-10-18T20:21:00Z
  Resource Version:  38840
  UID:               8cb0967d-05e0-4d7a-ac1c-08a7f7e89e84
Raw Result Storage:
  Node Selector:
    node-role.kubernetes.io/master:
  Pv Access Modes:
    ReadWriteOnce
  Rotation:  3 3
  Size:      1Gi 4
  Tolerations:
    Effect:              NoSchedule
    Key:                 node-role.kubernetes.io/master
    Operator:            Exists
    Effect:              NoExecute
    Key:                 node.kubernetes.io/not-ready
    Operator:            Exists
    Toleration Seconds:  300
    Effect:              NoExecute
    Key:                 node.kubernetes.io/unreachable
    Operator:            Exists
    Toleration Seconds:  300
    Effect:              NoSchedule
    Key:                 node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure
    Operator:            Exists
Roles: 5
  master
  worker
Scan Tolerations:
  Operator:           Exists
Schedule:             "0 1 * * *" 6
Show Not Applicable:  false
Strict Node Scan:     true
Events:               <none>

When you have defined the compliance scan requirements and configured the settings to run the scans, then the Compliance Operator processes it using the ScanSettingBinding object.

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSettingBinding
metadata:
  name: <name of the scan>
profiles: 1
  # Node checks
  - name: rhcos4-with-usb
    kind: TailoredProfile
    apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
  # Cluster checks
  - name: ocp4-moderate
    kind: Profile
    apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
settingsRef: 2
  name: my-companys-constraints
  kind: ScanSetting
  apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1

$ oc get compliancesuites

After the creation of compliance suite, you can monitor the status of the deployed scans using the ComplianceSuite object.

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ComplianceSuite
metadata:
  name: <name of the scan>
spec:
  autoApplyRemediations: false 1
  schedule: "0 1 * * *" 2
  scans: 3
    - name: workers-scan
      scanType: Node
      profile: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_moderate
      content: ssg-rhcos4-ds.xml
      contentImage: quay.io/complianceascode/ocp4:latest
      rule: "xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_no_netrc_files"
      nodeSelector:
        node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: ""
status:
  Phase: DONE 4
  Result: NON-COMPLIANT 5
  scanStatuses:
  - name: workers-scan
    phase: DONE
    result: NON-COMPLIANT

$ oc get events --field-selector involvedObject.kind=ComplianceSuite,involvedObject.name=<name of the suite>

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ComplianceScan
metadata:
  name: <name of the scan>
spec:
  scanType: Node 1
  profile: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_moderate 2
  content: ssg-ocp4-ds.xml
  contentImage: quay.io/complianceascode/ocp4:latest 3
  rule: "xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_no_netrc_files" 4
  nodeSelector: 5
    node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: ""
status:
  phase: DONE 6
  result: NON-COMPLIANT 7

oc get events --field-selector involvedObject.kind=ComplianceScan,involvedObject.name=<name of the suite>

When the compliance suite reaches the DONE phase, you can view the scan results and possible remediations.

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ComplianceCheckResult
metadata:
  labels:
    compliance.openshift.io/check-severity: medium
    compliance.openshift.io/check-status: FAIL
    compliance.openshift.io/suite: example-compliancesuite
    compliance.openshift.io/scan-name: workers-scan
  name: workers-scan-no-direct-root-logins
  namespace: openshift-compliance
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ComplianceScan
    name: workers-scan
description: <description of scan check>
instructions: <manual instructions for the scan>
id: xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_no_direct_root_logins
severity: medium 1
status: FAIL 2

oc get compliancecheckresults \
-l compliance.openshift.io/suite=workers-compliancesuite

apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ComplianceRemediation
metadata:
  labels:
    compliance.openshift.io/suite: example-compliancesuite
    compliance.openshift.io/scan-name: workers-scan
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
  name: workers-scan-disable-users-coredumps
  namespace: openshift-compliance
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ComplianceCheckResult
    name: workers-scan-disable-users-coredumps
    uid: <UID>
spec:
  apply: false 1
  object:
    current: 2
       apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
       kind: MachineConfig
       spec:
         config:
           ignition:
             version: 2.2.0
           storage:
             files:
             - contents:
                 source: data:,%2A%20%20%20%20%20hard%20%20%20core%20%20%20%200
               filesystem: root
               mode: 420
               path: /etc/security/limits.d/75-disable_users_coredumps.conf
    outdated: {} 3

oc get complianceremediations \
-l compliance.openshift.io/suite=workers-compliancesuite

oc get compliancecheckresults \
-l 'compliance.openshift.io/check-status in (FAIL),compliance.openshift.io/automated-remediation'

oc get compliancecheckresults \
-l 'compliance.openshift.io/check-status in (FAIL),!compliance.openshift.io/automated-remediation'

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 1.2.1:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 1.2.0:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 1.0.0:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 0.1.32:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 0.1.30:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 0.1.24:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 0.1.22:

The following advisory is available for the OpenShift File Integrity Operator 0.1.21:

If the Operator is not installed successfully:

The subscription of an installed Operator specifies an update channel that tracks and receives updates for the Operator. You can change the update channel to start tracking and receiving updates from a newer channel.

The names of update channels in a subscription can differ between Operators, but the naming scheme typically follows a common convention within a given Operator. For example, channel names might follow a minor release update stream for the application provided by the Operator (1.2, 1.3) or a release frequency (stable, fast).

Red Hat Customer Portal Labs include the following application that helps administrators prepare to update their Operators:

You can use the application to search for Operator Lifecycle Manager-based Operators and verify the available Operator version per update channel across different versions of OpenShift Container Platform. Cluster Version Operator-based Operators are not included.

You can change the update channel for an Operator by using the OpenShift Container Platform web console.

If an installed Operator has the approval strategy in its subscription set to Manual, when new updates are released in its current update channel, the update must be manually approved before installation can begin.

An instance of a FileIntegrity custom resource (CR) represents a set of continuous file integrity scans for one or more nodes.

Each FileIntegrity CR is backed by a daemon set running AIDE on the nodes matching the FileIntegrity CR specification.

The FileIntegrity custom resource (CR) reports its status through the .status.phase subresource.

The scan results of the FileIntegrity CR are reported in another object called FileIntegrityNodeStatuses.

$ oc get fileintegritynodestatuses

NAME                                                AGE
worker-fileintegrity-ip-10-0-130-192.ec2.internal   101s
worker-fileintegrity-ip-10-0-147-133.ec2.internal   109s
worker-fileintegrity-ip-10-0-165-160.ec2.internal   102s

There is one result object per node. The nodeName attribute of each FileIntegrityNodeStatus object corresponds to the node being scanned. The status of the file integrity scan is represented in the results array, which holds scan conditions.

$ oc get fileintegritynodestatuses.fileintegrity.openshift.io -ojsonpath='{.items[*].results}' | jq

The fileintegritynodestatus object reports the latest status of an AIDE run and exposes the status as Failed, Succeeded, or Errored in a status field.