Title

Rancher RKE2 must store only cryptographic representations of passwords. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Secrets, such as passwords, keys, tokens, and certificates should not be stored as environment variables. These environment variables are accessible inside RKE2 by the "Get Pod" API call, and by any system, such as CI/CD pipeline, which has access to the definition file of the container. Secrets must be mounted from files or stored within password vaults.

Check Content

On the RKE2 Control Plane, run the following commands: kubectl get pods -A kubectl get jobs -A kubectl get cronjobs -A This will output all running pods, jobs, and cronjobs. Evaluate each of the above commands using the respective commands below: kubectl get pod -n <namespace> <pod> -o yaml kubectl get job -n <namespace> <job> -o yaml kubectl get cronjob -n <namespace> <cronjob> -o yaml If any contain sensitive values as environment variables, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Any secrets stored as environment variables must be moved to the secret files with the proper protections and enforcements or placed within a password vault.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-254567r1016559_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-254567

Group Title: SRG-APP-000171-CTR-000435

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.