Container Audit — Docker & Kubernetes Security Review

Audit container images, Dockerfiles, Helm charts, Kustomize overlays, and Kubernetes manifests for misconfiguration, excessive privilege, exposed secrets, and runtime security gaps. Distinct from cloud-audit (cloud-provider IAM and managed services) and dependency-audit (package CVEs in the application). This skill is the container/orchestration layer between them.

Scope the Audit

1. Inventory the surface — Dockerfiles, base images, registries, Helm charts, K8s manifests, Kustomize overlays, CI build pipelines that produce images
2. Identify the runtime — vanilla K8s, EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, ECS Fargate, Cloud Run, Fly.io
3. Identify the network model — service mesh, ingress controller, default-deny vs default-allow
4. Identify the secret model — K8s Secrets (base64-only), External Secrets Operator, sealed-secrets, Vault, Doppler

Audit Checklist — Dockerfile

Base image & supply chain

• Pinned by digest, not tag — FROM node:20@sha256:abc... not FROM node:20 (which can move)
• Distroless / minimal where possible — gcr.io/distroless/nodejs20, alpine (be aware of musl quirks), chainguard/*
• Not using :latest — non-reproducible builds
• Multi-stage builds discard build-time tooling — FROM build AS builder → FROM runtime final stage
• Grep for: FROM .*:latest, FROM .*:[0-9]+$ (tag without digest)

Build-time exposure

• Secrets passed via --build-arg end up in image layers visible to anyone who pulls the image — use BuildKit secrets (--mount=type=secret) or runtime env vars instead
• COPY . . ships everything in the build context — .dockerignore should exclude .git, .env, node_modules, *.pem, .aws/, .ssh/
• ADD <url> follows redirects and disables checksum verification — prefer RUN curl ... && sha256sum -c
• Grep for: ARG .*KEY, ARG .*TOKEN, ARG .*SECRET, ENV .*=.*[A-Za-z0-9]{32,}, ADD http

Runtime posture

• Non-root user — USER 1001 (or any non-zero UID) before CMD
• No chmod 4755 SUID binaries in the final image
• No unnecessary shells / package managers in the final stage — distroless / FROM scratch is the strong default
• HEALTHCHECK defined so orchestrator can detect unhealthy containers
• Read-only root filesystem at runtime (set via K8s; verify nothing in the image writes outside /tmp or a declared volume)
• Grep for: USER root (or absence of any USER directive), chmod 4755, apt-get install.*sudo

Audit Checklist — Kubernetes manifests

Pod security

• securityContext.runAsNonRoot: true and runAsUser set to a non-zero UID
• securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
• securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem: true with explicit emptyDir mounts where the app needs to write
• securityContext.capabilities.drop: ["ALL"] then add only what's needed
• securityContext.privileged is never true in app workloads (Falco, kube-proxy, some CSI drivers are the rare legit exceptions)
• hostNetwork, hostPID, hostIPC all false — yes on these is "container can see / talk to the node"
• hostPath volumes — every one is a node-escape risk; review case by case
• Grep for: privileged: true, runAsUser: 0, hostNetwork: true, hostPath:

Pod Security Standards (PSS) / admission

• Cluster enforces restricted profile via PSS admission, or equivalent via OPA Gatekeeper / Kyverno
• Pod Security Policies (deprecated since 1.21, removed in 1.25) are NOT what's enforcing this — confirm a current admission controller
• No workloads in the kube-system namespace running app code

Network

• NetworkPolicy exists for every namespace running app workloads — default-deny ingress AND egress, then allow specific pods
• Missing NetworkPolicy = every pod can talk to every other pod on every port, including kube-apiserver and metadata service
• Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) mTLS in STRICT mode for sensitive namespaces, not PERMISSIVE
• Ingress controllers terminate TLS properly; backend tls.crt / tls.key in K8s Secrets rotate

Secrets

• K8s Secrets are base64-encoded, NOT encrypted — by default they're plain bytes in etcd
• etcd encryption at rest enabled — --encryption-provider-config on kube-apiserver
• Workloads consume secrets via projected volumes, not environment variables (env vars leak via /proc/<pid>/environ, error reports, crash dumps)
• External Secrets Operator / Vault / sealed-secrets bridge so the Git repo never contains plaintext
• Grep for: kind: Secret in Git with data: fields (base64-encoded values committed)

RBAC

• No ClusterRole with * verbs on * resources except cluster-admin (audit who's bound to it)
• ServiceAccount per workload, not shared "default" SA
• automountServiceAccountToken: false on workloads that don't need API access
• Bindings of system:authenticated group are visible to every legitimate workload — almost always wrong
• Grep for: verbs: ["*"], resources: ["*"], apiGroups: ["*"], system:authenticated

Resource limits

• Every container has resources.requests and resources.limits set — missing limits = noisy neighbor + DoS surface (one pod can starve the node)
• LimitRange per namespace as a backstop
• ResourceQuota per namespace prevents tenant-vs-tenant resource exhaustion

Image policy

• imagePullPolicy: Always for :latest (you shouldn't use :latest, but if you do) — otherwise the node caches stale images
• Cluster-level policy that all images come from approved registries (your own + a small allow-list); enforced via Gatekeeper / Kyverno / image-policy-webhook
• Image signature verification — cosign + sigstore policy controller, or Notary v2

Audit Checklist — runtime

• Image scanning in CI — trivy image, grype, docker scout cves. Must run on every build; advisories should not block but should surface
• Runtime detection — Falco / Tracee / Tetragon catches "shell spawned in a pod that has never opened a shell" patterns
• Audit logs enabled — kube-apiserver audit log captures exec, attach, port-forward events for incident response
• kubectl exec access tracked — not free for any cluster-admin to silently shell into prod

Useful one-liners

# All Dockerfiles in the repo + their first FROM line
git ls-files | grep -E '(^|/)Dockerfile(\.|$)' | xargs -I{} sh -c 'echo "==> {}"; grep ^FROM "{}"'

# Manifests missing securityContext
grep -rL "securityContext" --include="*.yaml" --include="*.yml" .

# Manifests with privileged containers
grep -rln "privileged: *true" --include="*.yaml" --include="*.yml" .

# Manifests with hostPath volumes
grep -rln "hostPath:" --include="*.yaml" --include="*.yml" .

# Secrets in Git (base64-encoded but readable)
grep -rln "kind: *Secret" --include="*.yaml" --include="*.yml" . | xargs grep -l "^data:"

# Image scan (Trivy)
trivy image --severity HIGH,CRITICAL --exit-code 0 <image>

# Manifest scan (Trivy)
trivy config --severity HIGH,CRITICAL .

# Cluster posture (kube-bench, run inside the cluster)
kube-bench run --targets master,node,policies

Verify Fixes at Runtime

• runAsNonRoot: true — verify the pod restarts cleanly and stays Running; if the image's ENTRYPOINT calls chown it'll crashloop
• NetworkPolicy default-deny — verify legitimate traffic still works (run an in-cluster kubectl run -it --rm debug ... curl); silent partial outages are common after default-deny rollout
• readOnlyRootFilesystem: true — verify the app doesn't write outside declared emptyDir mounts; log writes, PID files, and tmp files are common breakers
• Image-policy enforcement — try to deploy an unsigned / off-list image; verify admission rejects it

Report Format

# Container Security Audit
## Target: [cluster name / image registry / repo path]
## Date: [date]

### Summary
- Dockerfiles audited: N
- Manifests audited: N
- Cluster posture checks: pass / fail counts

### Findings
| ID | Severity | Category | Location | Issue |
|----|----------|----------|----------|-------|

### Per-finding detail
#### [SEVERITY] [Title]
**File:** `path/to/manifest.yaml:42`
**Category:** Dockerfile | Pod security | RBAC | NetworkPolicy | Secrets | Resource limits | Image policy | Runtime

**Description:** [what the issue is]

**Vulnerable config:**
```yaml
[snippet]

Remediation:

[fixed snippet]

Verification: [observed behavior proving the fix holds]

Disposition rule (Fixed / Deferred / Accepted Risk) matches `owasp-audit`.

## Boundaries

- Only audit clusters and registries the user provides or has authorization for
- Never `kubectl delete` or modify cluster state during an audit — read-only operations only (`get`, `describe`, `auth can-i`)
- For runtime evidence, prefer non-disruptive checks (a `kubectl run -it --rm` ephemeral debug pod) over modifying running workloads
- Refuse cluster-takeover scenarios — escalating from a found weakness to a full pivot is exploitation, not audit
- Flag low-confidence findings as "Potential" rather than confirmed

## References

- CIS Docker Benchmark
- CIS Kubernetes Benchmark
- NSA/CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guide
- Pod Security Standards (PSS) — restricted, baseline, privileged
- OWASP Docker Security Cheat Sheet
- OWASP Kubernetes Security Cheat Sheet
- MITRE ATT&CK for Containers