EKS Security Hardening

Problems we solve

• Pods running as root with excessive host mounts and privileged containers
• Overly permissive RBAC: cluster-admin bindings for service accounts that need read-only access
• Worker nodes with public IP addresses and unrestricted security groups
• No network policies, any pod can reach any other pod in the cluster
• Secrets stored in plain ConfigMaps or baked into container images
• No admission controller to block workloads that break policy from being deployed

Our approach

1. 01

   Security assessment

   We run kube-bench (CIS Benchmark), Trivy for image scanning, and a manual RBAC review. You receive a scored findings report.

2. 02

   RBAC and IAM hardening

   We replace overly broad bindings with least-privilege roles, migrate workloads from EC2 instance profiles to IRSA, and audit aws-auth ConfigMap bindings.

3. 03

   Network segmentation

   We implement a default-deny NetworkPolicy baseline and explicit allow rules per service. We configure VPC security groups for node-level isolation.

4. 04

   Secrets management

   We migrate plain-text Secrets to AWS Secrets Manager using the External Secrets Operator (ESO). Image credentials are rotated and stored in ECR or Secrets Manager.

5. 05

   Admission and runtime controls

   We configure OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno policies to block privileged containers, require resource limits, and enforce image tag policies. Falco provides runtime anomaly detection.

Results