Skip to content

Kubernetes

EXPERIMENTAL

This feature might change without preserving backwards compatibility.

CLI

The Trivy K8s CLI allows you to scan your Kubernetes cluster for

  • Vulnerabilities
  • Misconfigurations
  • Secrets

You can either run the CLI locally or integrate it into your CI/CD pipeline. The difference to the Trivy CLI is that the Trivy K8s CLI allows you to scan running workloads directly within your cluster.

If you are looking for continuous cluster audit scanning, have a look at the Trivy K8s operator below.

Trivy uses your local kubectl configuration to access the API server to list artifacts.

Commands

Scan a full cluster and generate a simple summary report:

$ trivy k8s --report=summary cluster

k8s Summary Report

The summary report is the default. To get all of the detail the output contains, use --report all.

Filter by severity:

$ trivy k8s --severity=CRITICAL --report=all cluster

Filter by scanners (Vulnerabilities, Secrets or Misconfigurations):

$ trivy k8s --scanners=secret --report=summary cluster
# or
$ trivy k8s --scanners=config --report=summary cluster

Scan a specific namespace:

$ trivy k8s -n kube-system --report=summary all

Use a specific kubeconfig file:

$ trivy k8s --kubeconfig ~/.kube/config2 -n kube-system --report=summary all

Scan a specific resource and get all the output:

$ trivy k8s deployment appname

Scan all deploys, or deploys and configmaps:

$ trivy k8s --report=summary deployment
$ trivy k8s --report=summary deployment,configmaps

If you want to pass in flags before scanning specific workloads, you will have to do it before the resource name. For example, scanning a deployment in the app namespace of your Kubernetes cluster for critical vulnerabilities would be done through the following command:

$ trivy k8s -n app --severity=CRITICAL deployment/appname
This is specific to all Trivy CLI commands.

The supported formats are table, which is the default, and json. To get a JSON output on a full cluster scan:

$ trivy k8s --format json -o results.json cluster
Result
{
  "ClusterName": "minikube",
  "Vulnerabilities": [
    {
      "Namespace": "default",
      "Kind": "Deployment",
      "Name": "app",
      "Results": [
        {
          "Target": "ubuntu:latest (ubuntu 22.04)",
          "Class": "os-pkgs",
          "Type": "ubuntu",
          "Vulnerabilities": [
            {
              "VulnerabilityID": "CVE-2016-2781",
              "PkgName": "coreutils",
              "InstalledVersion": "8.32-4.1ubuntu1",
              "Layer": {
                "Digest": "sha256:125a6e411906fe6b0aaa50fc9d600bf6ff9bb11a8651727ce1ed482dc271c24c",
                "DiffID": "sha256:e59fc94956120a6c7629f085027578e6357b48061d45714107e79f04a81a6f0c"
              },
              "SeveritySource": "ubuntu",
              "PrimaryURL": "https://avd.aquasec.com/nvd/cve-2016-2781",
              "DataSource": {
                "ID": "ubuntu",
                "Name": "Ubuntu CVE Tracker",
                "URL": "https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cve-tracker"
              },
              "Title": "coreutils: Non-privileged session can escape to the parent session in chroot",
              "Description": "chroot in GNU coreutils, when used with --userspec, allows local users to escape to the parent session via a crafted TIOCSTI ioctl call, which pushes characters to the terminal's input buffer.",
              "Severity": "LOW",
              "CweIDs": [
                "CWE-20"
              ],
              "VendorSeverity": {
                "cbl-mariner": 2,
                "nvd": 2,
                "redhat": 2,
                "ubuntu": 1
              },
              "CVSS": {
                "nvd": {
                  "V2Vector": "AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N",
                  "V3Vector": "CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:N",
                  "V2Score": 2.1,
                  "V3Score": 6.5
                },
                "redhat": {
                  "V2Vector": "AV:L/AC:H/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C",
                  "V3Vector": "CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H",
                  "V2Score": 6.2,
                  "V3Score": 8.6
                }
              },
              "References": [
                "http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q1/452",
                "http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/02/28/2",
                "http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/02/28/3",
                "https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2016-2781",
                "https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-2781",
                "https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf9fa47ab66495c78bb4120b0754dd9531ca2ff0430f6685ac9b07772@%3Cdev.mina.apache.org%3E",
                "https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/793178/",
                "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-2781"
              ],
              "PublishedDate": "2017-02-07T15:59:00Z",
              "LastModifiedDate": "2021-02-25T17:15:00Z"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "Misconfigurations": [
    {
      "Namespace": "default",
      "Kind": "Deployment",
      "Name": "app",
      "Results": [
        {
          "Target": "Deployment/app",
          "Class": "config",
          "Type": "kubernetes",
          "MisconfSummary": {
            "Successes": 20,
            "Failures": 19,
            "Exceptions": 0
          },
          "Misconfigurations": [
            {
              "Type": "Kubernetes Security Check",
              "ID": "KSV001",
              "Title": "Process can elevate its own privileges",
              "Description": "A program inside the container can elevate its own privileges and run as root, which might give the program control over the container and node.",
              "Message": "Container 'app' of Deployment 'app' should set 'securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation' to false",
              "Namespace": "builtin.kubernetes.KSV001",
              "Query": "data.builtin.kubernetes.KSV001.deny",
              "Resolution": "Set 'set containers[].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation' to 'false'.",
              "Severity": "MEDIUM",
              "PrimaryURL": "https://avd.aquasec.com/misconfig/ksv001",
              "References": [
                "https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/security/pod-security-standards/#restricted",
                "https://avd.aquasec.com/misconfig/ksv001"
              ],
              "Status": "FAIL",
              "Layer": {},
              "IacMetadata": {
                "Provider": "Kubernetes",
                "Service": "general",
                "StartLine": 121,
                "EndLine": 133
              }
            },
            {
              "Type": "Kubernetes Security Check",
              "ID": "KSV003",
              "Title": "Default capabilities not dropped",
              "Description": "The container should drop all default capabilities and add only those that are needed for its execution.",
              "Message": "Container 'app' of Deployment 'app' should add 'ALL' to 'securityContext.capabilities.drop'",
              "Namespace": "builtin.kubernetes.KSV003",
              "Query": "data.builtin.kubernetes.KSV003.deny",
              "Resolution": "Add 'ALL' to containers[].securityContext.capabilities.drop.",
              "Severity": "LOW",
              "PrimaryURL": "https://avd.aquasec.com/misconfig/ksv003",
              "References": [
                "https://kubesec.io/basics/containers-securitycontext-capabilities-drop-index-all/",
                "https://avd.aquasec.com/misconfig/ksv003"
              ],
              "Status": "FAIL",
              "Layer": {},
              "IacMetadata": {
                "Provider": "Kubernetes",
                "Service": "general",
                "StartLine": 121,
                "EndLine": 133
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Namespace": "default",
      "Kind": "ConfigMap",
      "Name": "kube-root-ca.crt"
    }
  ]
}

Infra checks

Trivy by default scans kubernetes infra components (apiserver, controller-manager, scheduler and etcd) if they exist under the kube-system namespace. For example, if you run a full cluster scan, or scan all components under kube-system with commands:

$ trivy k8s cluster --report summary # full cluster scan
$ trivy k8s all -n kube-system --report summary # scan all components under kube-system

A table will be printed about misconfigurations found on kubernetes core components:

Summary Report for minikube
┌─────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│  Namespace  │               Resource               │ Kubernetes Infra Assessment │
│             │                                      ├────┬────┬────┬─────┬────────┤
│             │                                      │ C  │ H  │ M  │ L   │   U    │
├─────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────┼────┼────┼────┼─────┼────────┤
│ kube-system │ Pod/kube-apiserver-minikube          │    │    │ 1  │ 10  │        │
│ kube-system │ Pod/kube-controller-manager-minikube │    │    │    │ 3   │        │
│ kube-system │ Pod/kube-scheduler-minikube          │    │    │    │ 1   │        │
└─────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────┴────┴────┴────┴─────┴────────┘
Severities: C=CRITICAL H=HIGH M=MEDIUM L=LOW U=UNKNOWN

The infra checks are based on CIS Benchmarks recommendations for kubernetes.

If you want filter only for the infra checks, you can use the flag --components along with the --scanners=config

$ trivy k8s cluster --report summary --components=infra --scanners=config # scan only infra

Or, to filter for all other checks besides the infra checks, you can:

$ trivy k8s cluster --report summary --components=workload --scanners=config # scan all components besides infra

Compliance

This section describes Kubernetes specific compliance reports. For an overview of Trivy's Compliance feature, including working with custom compliance, check out the Compliance documentation.

Built in reports

The following reports are available out of the box:

Compliance Name for command More info
NSA, CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance v1.2 k8s-nsa Link
CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes v1.23 k8s-cis Link
Pod Security Standards, Baseline k8s-pss-baseline Link
Pod Security Standards, Restricted k8s-pss-restricted Link

Examples

Scan a full cluster and generate a compliance summary report:

$ trivy k8s cluster --compliance=<compliance_id> --report summary

Note : The Issues column represent the total number of failed checks for this control.

Get all of the detailed output for checks:

trivy k8s cluster --compliance=<compliance_id> --report all

Report result in JSON format:

trivy k8s cluster --compliance=<compliance_id> --report summary --format json
trivy k8s cluster --compliance=<compliance_id> --report all --format json

Operator

Trivy has a native Kubernetes Operator which continuously scans your Kubernetes cluster for security issues, and generates security reports as Kubernetes Custom Resources. It does it by watching Kubernetes for state changes and automatically triggering scans in response to changes, for example initiating a vulnerability scan when a new Pod is created.

Kubernetes-native security toolkit. (Documentation).

Workload reconcilers discover K8s controllers, manage scan jobs, and create VulnerabilityReport and ConfigAuditReport objects.