Auditing Kubernetes Cluster Rbac

# Auditing Kubernetes Cluster RBAC

## When to Use

- When performing security assessments of Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, or self-managed)
- When validating that RBAC policies enforce least privilege for users and service accounts
- When investigating potential lateral movement or privilege escalation within a Kubernetes cluster
- When compliance audits require documentation of access controls and permissions
- When onboarding new teams to a shared cluster and defining appropriate RBAC policies

**Do not use** for network policy auditing (use Cilium or Calico network policy tools), for container image scanning (use Trivy or Grype), or for runtime security monitoring (use Falco or Sysdig Secure).

## Prerequisites

- kubectl configured with cluster-admin or equivalent read permissions to the target cluster
- rbac-tool installed (`kubectl krew install rbac-tool` or binary from GitHub)
- KubiScan installed (`pip install kubiscan`)
- Kubeaudit installed (`brew install kubeaudit` or from GitHub releases)
- Access to the cluster's audit logs for correlating RBAC findings with actual API access

## Workflow

### Step 1: Enumerate ClusterRoles and Roles with Dangerous Permissions

Identify roles with wildcard permissions, secret access, pod exec, or escalation capabilities.

```bash
# List all ClusterRoles with wildcard verb access
kubectl get clusterroles -o json | python3 -c "
import json, sys
data = json.load(sys.stdin)
for role in data['items']:
    name = role['metadata']['name']
    for rule in role.get('rules', []):
        verbs = rule.get('verbs', [])
        resources = rule.get('resources', [])
        if '*' in verbs or '*' in resources:
            print(f'ClusterRole: {name}')
            print(f'  Verbs: {verbs}')
            print(f'  Resources: {resources}')
            print(f'  API Groups: {rule.get(\"apiGroups\", [])}')
            print()
"

# Find roles that can read secrets
kubectl get clusterroles -o json | python3 -c "
import json, sys
data = json.load(sys.stdin)
for role in data['items']:
    name = role['metadata']['name']