CVE-2020-8557: Node disk DOS by writing to container /etc/hosts

[joelsmith]

CVSS Rating: Medium (5.5)  CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H/CR:H/IR:H/AR:M

The /etc/hosts file mounted in a pod by kubelet is not included by the kubelet eviction manager when calculating ephemeral storage usage by a pod. If a pod writes a large amount of data to the /etc/hosts file, it could fill the storage space of the node and cause the node to fail.

Am I vulnerable?

Any clusters allowing pods with sufficient privileges to write to their own /etc/hosts files are affected. This includes containers running with CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE in their capabilities bounding set (true by default) and either UID 0 (root) or a security context with allowPrivilegeEscalation: true (true by default).

Affected Versions

• kubelet v1.18.0-1.18.5
• kubelet v1.17.0-1.17.8
• kubelet < v1.16.13

How do I mitigate this vulnerability?

Prior to upgrading, this vulnerability can be mitigated by using PodSecurityPolicies or other admission webhooks to force containers to drop CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE or to prohibit privilege escalation and running as root, but these measures may break existing workloads that rely upon these privileges to function properly.

Fixed Versions

• kubelet master - fixed by Include pod /etc/hosts in ephemeral storage calculation for eviction #92916
• kubelet v1.18.6 - fixed by Automated cherry pick of #92916: Include pod /etc/hosts in ephemeral storage calculation for #92921
• kubelet v1.17.9 - fixed by Automated cherry pick of #92916: Include pod /etc/hosts in ephemeral storage calculation for #92923
• kubelet v1.16.13 - fixed by Automated cherry pick of #92916: Include pod /etc/hosts in ephemeral storage calculation for #92924

To upgrade, refer to the documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/cluster-management/#upgrading-a-cluster

Detection

Large pod etc-hosts files may indicate that a pod is attempting to perform a Denial of Service attack using this bug. A command such as

find /var/lib/kubelet/pods/*/etc-hosts -size +1M

run on a node can be used to find abnormally large pod etc-hosts files.

Acknowledgements

This vulnerability was reported by Kebe Liu of DaoCloud, via the Kubernetes bug bounty program.

/area security
/kind bug
/committee product-security
/sig node
/area kubelet

[aermakov-zalando]

If this is a security issue, should I re-report #83107 as one as well? It's allows the same thing (silently consuming arbitrary disk space on the node), but you don't even need /etc/hosts to be writable, any directory would do.

[joelsmith]

@aermakov-zalando please direct security disclosures or questions about security disclosures to one of the methods outlined here: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/security/#report-a-vulnerability