Threat Actors

ActorDescription
External AttackerAn attacker who is external to the cluster and is unauthenticated
Internal AttackerAn attacker who has some access in the cluster, such as an attacker with container access (Attacker in a Pod)
Malicious Internal UserA user, such as administrator or developer, who uses their privileged position maliciously against the system, or stolen credentials used for the same.
AdministratorAn actual administrator of the system, tasked with operating and maintaining the cluster as a whole
DeveloperAn application developer, who is deploying application to a cluster, either directly or through another user such as administrator
End UserAn external user of an application hosted by a cluster

We will primarily focus on two type of threat actors in Kubernetes Security Testing Guide (KSTG), however we will refer to other threat actors as required.

  1. External Attacker
  2. Internal Attacker (Attacker in a Pod)

Reference

  • https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/wg-security-audit/