Skip to content

Use Kubescape to configure a validating admission policy

What is Validating Admission Policy?

Validating admission policies offer 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. Validation admission policies are highly configurable, enabling policy authors to define policies that can be parameterized and scoped to resources as needed by cluster administrators.

What Resources Make a Policy

A policy is generally made up of three resources: * The ValidatingAdmissionPolicy describes the abstract logic of a policy (think: "this policy makes sure a particular label is set to a particular value"). * A ValidatingAdmissionPolicyBinding links the above resources together and provides scoping. If you only want to require an owner label to be set for Pods, the binding is where you would specify this restriction. * A parameter resource provides information to a ValidatingAdmissionPolicy to make it a concrete statement (think "the owner label must be set to something that ends in .company.com"). A native type such as ConfigMap or a CRD defines the schema of a parameter resource. ValidatingAdmissionPolicy objects specify what Kind they are expecting for their parameter resource.

At least a ValidatingAdmissionPolicy and a corresponding ValidatingAdmissionPolicyBinding must be defined for a policy to have an effect.

If a ValidatingAdmissionPolicy does not need to be configured via parameters, simply leave spec.paramKind in ValidatingAdmissionPolicy not specified.

Before you begin

  • Ensure the ValidatingAdmissionPolicy feature gate is enabled.
  • Ensure that the admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1beta1 API is enabled.

Getting Started with Validating Admission Policy

Deploying the CEL Admission Policy Library

Downloading and deploying the CEL Admission Policy Library is a simple operation with kubescape: 

kubescape vap deploy-library | kubectl apply -f -

You can now see all controls available in the library by running: 

kubectl get ValidatingAdmissionPolicy -A

Creating a Validating Admission Policy Binding

Let's now create a policy binding for the C-0073 control in the default namespace: 

kubescape vap create-policy-binding --name my-policy-binding --policy kubescape-c-0073-deny-naked-pods --namespace default | kubectl apply -f -

Testing the Validating Admission Policy

This command should be denied since the binding on C-0073 forbids creating naked pods in the default namespace.

kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --namespace default
The pods "nginx" is invalid: : ValidatingAdmissionPolicy 'kubescape-c-0073-deny-naked-pods' with binding 'replicalimit-binding-nontest' denied request: Pods doesn't have a parent! (see more at https://kubescape.io/docs/controls/c-0073/)