Kubernetes Confidential: Enhancing Pod Security

Safeguarding Kubernetes Secrets: A Guide to Encrypted Data Management

From Basic Encoding to Advanced Encryption: Elevating Kubernetes Secrets to Secure Sensitive Information

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Table of Contents

1. Secrets
2. Using Secrets via Environment Variables
3. Mounting Secrets as Volumes

1. Secrets

Pods can access local data using volumes, but there is some data we don’t want readable to the naked eye. Passwords may be an example. Someone reading through a yaml file may read a password and remember it. Using the Secret API resource, the same password could be encoded. A casual reading would not give away the password.

Secrets can be created, retrieved, or deleted:

$ kubectl get secrets

Secrets can be manually encoded with kubectl create secret:

$ kubectl create secret generic - help
$ kubectl create secret generic mysql - from-literal=password=root

A secret is not encrypted by default, only base64-encoded. We can see the encoded string inside the secret with kubectl. The…