Light Dark
December 6, 2018 By Security Intelligence Staff 2 min read

This post originally appeared on the IBM Cloud blog and is being shared with permission.

What’s happening?

We’re taking action to secure our IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service against the recent Kubernetes security vulnerabilities.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is affected by the following vulnerabilities that, in some cases, allow unauthorized access to Kubernetes and/or trusted user privilege escalation.

Vulnerability Details

Affected Products and Versions

  • Affected components: Kubernetes API server
  • Affected versions:
    • Kubernetes versions 1.0.x through 1.9.x
    • 1.12.0-1.12.2 (fixed in v1.12.3)
    • 1.11.0-1.11.4 (fixed in v1.11.5)
    • 1.10.0-1.10.10 (fixed in v1.10.11)
    • 1.9.x and 1.8.x (update to v1.10.11)
    • 1.7 (update to 1.9.x and then update to 1.10.11)
    • 1.5 (unsupported, no migration path)

What do I need to know?

This exposure affects your IBM Cloud Kubernetes cluster master only, there is no exposure to your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Workers.

There are two exploits as part of this vulnerability:

Vulnerability 1: Authenticated and unauthenticated requests can provide full admin access to Kubernetes API Server.

  • Affected users: This only affects users with aggregated API servers.
    • 1.11 and earlier: IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service does not deploy any aggregated API servers in versions 1.11 and earlier. You will not be impacted unless you have deployed your own aggregated API server.
    • 1.12: All users are affected since all clusters contain the metrics-server, which is an aggregated API server affected by this vulnerability.

Vulnerability 2: Authenticated users with specific permissions to exec/attach/portforward API calls can be escalated to perform any API request against the kubelet API on the node specified in the pod spec.

  • Affected users: All IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters are affected by this vulnerability.

We are releasing updates for all supported releases of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service this week. Then, all supported clusters will auto-update to remediate the vulnerabilities during the next few days.

How do I mitigate the issue?

If you are on a supported release, then you don’t need to do anything, your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster Master will be updated automatically.

All supported IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters at version 1.10 and later will be updated automatically to address this security flaw. If you find that your cluster has not been automatically updated over the next few days, please contact IBM Support.

Customers running unsupported IBM Cloud Kubernetes versions must upgrade the affected clusters to a supported version 1.10.11, 1.11.5, 1.12.3, or later when these versions are released by IBM.

Refer to https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/containers/cs_versions.html for more information about Kubernetes versions.

You do not need to update your workers for this exposure, we do recommend that you always stay current with your workers to ensure you are not vulnerable to other exposures.

How do I check my version?

To see which Kubernetes versions the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service has released:
ibmcloud ks kube-versions

To see which version your clusters are currently using:
ibmcloud ks clusters

What about unsupported clusters?

For 1.9.x or 1.8.x, you must update your cluster to a supported release:
ibmcloud ks cluster-update --cluster <clustername> --kube-version 1.10

For 1.7.x, you must first update to 1.9 and then update to a supported release:

  1. Run: ibmcloud ks cluster-update --cluster <clustername> --kube-version 1.9
  2. Confirm that the update completed successfully by checking the Kubernetes version.
  3. Run: >ibmcloud ks cluster-update --cluster <clustername> --kube-version 1.10

Questions or comments

Please join us on our public Slack channel at https://ibm-container-service.slack.com or raise a support ticket if you have any issues.

 |  |  |  | 
Security Intelligence Staff
Security Intelligence Staff

More from

May 1, 2024

New proposed federal data privacy law suggests big changes

3 min read - After years of work and unsuccessful attempts at legislation, a draft of a federal data privacy law was recently released. The United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce released the American Privacy Rights Act on April 7, 2024. Several issues stood in the way of passing legislation in the past, such as whether states could issue tougher rules and if individuals could sue companies for privacy violations. With the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024, the U.S. government established…

April 30, 2024

AI cybersecurity solutions detect ransomware in under 60 seconds

2 min read - Worried about ransomware? If so, it’s not surprising. According to the World Economic Forum, for large cyber losses (€1 million+), the number of cases in which data is exfiltrated is increasing, doubling from 40% in 2019 to almost 80% in 2022. And more recent activity is tracking even higher.Meanwhile, other dangers are appearing on the horizon. For example, the 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states that threat group investment is increasingly focused on generative AI attack tools.Criminals have been…

April 29, 2024

The major hardware flaw in Apple M-series chips

3 min read - The “need for speed” is having a negative impact on many Mac users right now. The Apple M-series chips, which are designed to deliver more consistent and faster performance than the Intel processors used in the past, have a vulnerability that can expose cryptographic keys, leading an attacker to reveal encrypted data. This critical security flaw, known as GoFetch, exploits a vulnerability found in the M-chips data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP). DMP’s benefits and vulnerabilities DMP predicts memory addresses that the…

Topic updates

 Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today
© 2024 IBM Contact Privacy Terms of use Accessibility Cookie Preferences
Sponsored by si-icon-eightbarfeature