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Frameworks and controls

Security researchers and professionals codify best practices in controls: preventative, detective or corrective measures that can be taken to avoid, or contain, a security breach.

A security framework is a set of guidelines, best practices, or standards, usually codified as a number of controls. Security frameworks are often published by government agencies or non-profit research centers.

Kubescape comes with hundreds of controls that can be used in either provided or custom frameworks. The controls are tests that look at a certain aspect of your security posture. Kubescape can examine:

  • Kubernetes object configuration: any YAML file, any Helm chart, or any resource that the API server exposes.
  • API server settings: configuration of the Kubernetes API server.
  • Worker nodes: the configuration of the Kubernetes worker nodes, including kubelet configuration and host settings.
  • Container image: the results from image scanning, to give you high-level visibility into items that need your attention.

Kubescape's controls are written in the Rego language, and evaluated using the Open Policy Agent.

The controls, and their grouping into frameworks, are maintained in the Kubescape regolibrary repository.

Validating Admission Policy

Since Kubernetes 1.30, you can validate the admission policy of your cluster with the Validating Admission Policy, which is a declarative, in-process alternative to validating admission webhooks. Validating admission policies use the Common Expression Language (CEL) to declare the validation rules of a policy.

Kubescape controls have been converted to CEL expressions and can be used as a validating admission policy (see next steps below).

Next steps