Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) Practice Exam
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) Practice Exam
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) is a vendor-neutral certification from the Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for professionals seeking to validate practical Kubernetes security skills. It focuses on securing Kubernetes environments through cluster hardening, system security, microservice vulnerabilities, supply chain security, and monitoring, logging, and runtime security. Candidates work with key security concepts including RBAC, network policies, Pod security, secrets management, container isolation, image security, audit logging, and runtime threat detection. The CKS exam is an online, proctored, performance-based assessment requiring candidates to complete hands-on Kubernetes tasks within two hours. A valid Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification is required before attempting the CKS exam. It is suitable for DevOps engineers, SREs, system administrators, cloud professionals, and security practitioners working with Kubernetes environments.
Course Outline
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Use appropriate pod security standards
- Manage Kubernetes secrets
- Understand and implement isolation techniques (multi-tenancy, sandboxed containers, etc.)
- Implement Pod-to-Pod encryption (Cilium, Istio)
- 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)
- 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
