Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) Upcoming Program Changes

Cluster Setup Domain – 15%

• Use Network security policies to restrict cluster level access
• Use CIS benchmark to review the security configuration of Kubernetes components (etcd, kubelet, kubedns, kubeapi)
• Properly set up Ingress with TLS
• Protect node metadata and endpoints
• Verify platform binaries before deploying

Cluster Hardening Domain – 15%

• Use Role Based Access Controls to minimize exposure
• Exercise caution in using service accounts e.g. disable defaults, minimize permissions on newly created ones
• Restrict access to Kubernetes API
• Upgrade Kubernetes to avoid vulnerabilities

System Hardening Domain – 10% 

• Minimize host OS footprint (reduce attack surface)
• Using least-privilege identity and access management
• Minimize external access to the network
• Appropriately use kernel hardening tools such as AppArmor, seccomp

Minimize Microservice Vulnerabilities Domain – 20%

• Use appropriate pod security standards
• Manage Kubernetes secrets
• Understand and implement isolation techniques (multi-tenancy, sandboxed containers, etc.)
• Implement Pod-to-Pod encryption using Cilium

Supply Chain Security Domain – 20%

• Minimize base image footprint
• Understand your supply chain (e.g. SBOM, CI/CD, artifact repositories)
• Secure your supply chain (permitted registries, sign and validate artifacts, etc.)
• Perform static analysis of user workloads and container images (e.g. Kubesec, KubeLinter)

Monitoring, Logging and Runtime Security Domain – 20%

• Perform behavioral analytics to detect malicious activities
• Detect threats within physical infrastructure, apps, networks, data, users and workloads
• Investigate and identify phases of attack and bad actors within the environment
• Ensure immutability of containers at runtime
• Use Kubernetes audit logs to monitor access