Survey on Kubernetes Misconfiguration Vulnerabilities and Best Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Containerization has become a mainstream approach for deploying applications due to its scalability, portability, and efficiency. As systems grow in size and complexity, managing container interactions becomes increasingly challenging and prone to security misconfigurations. Kubernetes, the leading container orchestrator, simplifies orchestration but introduces a new set of security concerns. Despite a growing body of literature and tooling, guidance on Kubernetes misconfiguration vulnerabilities remains fragmented across academic and industry sources. This survey addresses that gap by consolidating and analyzing diverse resources to provide a comprehensive view of the threat landscape. Specifically, we identify: (I) 134 distinct misconfigurations, (II) eleven widely recommended security practices, and (III) ten root categories of Kubernetes-related vulnerabilities. Our findings aim to assist both practitioners and researchers in understanding common pitfalls and applying effective mitigation strategies to secure Kubernetes environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".