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Network Policies💣

To increase the overall security posture of Big Bang, network policies are put in place to only allow ingress and egress from package namespaces to other needed services. A deny by default policy is put in place to deny all traffic that is not explicitly allowed. The following is how to implement the network policies per Big Bang standards.

Table of Contents💣

Prerequisites💣

  • Understanding of ports and communications of applications and other components within BigBang
  • chart/templates/bigbang and chart/templates/bigbang/networkpolicies folders within package for committing bigbang specific templates

Integration💣

All examples in this documentation will center on podinfo.

Default Deny💣

In order to keep Big Bang secure, a default deny policy must be put into place for each package. Create default-deny-all.yaml inside chart/templates/bigbang/networkpolicies with the following details:

{{ if .Values.networkPolicies.enabled }}
# Default deny everything to/from this namespace
kind: NetworkPolicy
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: default-deny-all
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  - Egress
  egress: []
  ingress: []
{{- end }}

Default Allow💣

For packages with more than one pod/deployment and those pods/deployments need to talk to each other, add a policy that allows all ingress/egress between pods in the namespace. Create default-allow-ns.yaml inside chart/templates/bigbang/networkpolicies with the following details:

{{- if .Values.networkPolicies.enabled }}
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-allow-ns
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
    - Ingress
    - Egress
  ingress:
    - from:
        - podSelector: {}
  egress:
    - to:
        - podSelector: {}
{{- end }}

Was Something Important Blocked?💣

There are a few ways to determine if a network policy is blocking egress or ingress to or from a pod. - Test things from the pod’s perspective using ssh/exec. See this portion of the keycloak quickstart for an example of how do to that. - Curl a pod’s IP from another pod to see if network polices are blocking that traffic. Use kubectl pod -o wide -n <podNamespace> to see pod IP addresses. - Check the pod logs (or curl from one container to the service) for a context deadline exceeded or connection refused message.

Allowing Exceptions💣

  • Egress exceptions to consider:
  • pod to pod
  • SSO
    • When available, use a value from the helm values for the port
    • Otherwise, use the SSO default and allow egress to all IPs, except the cloud metadata IP. The default port should be 443.
  • storage database
    • When available, use a value from the helm values for the port
    • Otherwise, use the database default and allow egress to all IPs, except the cloud metadata IP.
  • Istiod for istio-proxy sidecars
  • Ingress exceptions to consider:
  • Kube-api
  • Prometheus
  • Istio for virtual service
  • web endpoints
  • Once you have determined an exception needs to be made, create a template in chart/templates/bigbang/networkpolicies.
  • NetworkPolicy templates follow the naming convention of direction-destination.yaml (eg: egress-dns.yaml).
  • Each networkPolicy template in the package will have an if statement checking for networkPolicies.enabled and will only be present when enabled: true

For example, if the podinfo package needs to send information to istiod, add the following content to a file named egress-istio-d.yaml:

{{- if and .Values.networkPolicies.enabled .Values.istio.enabled }}
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: egress-istiod
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Egress
  egress:
  - to:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          app.kubernetes.io/name: istio-controlplane
      podSelector:
        matchLabels:
          app: istiod
    ports:
    - port: 15012
{{- end }}

Similarly, if prometheus needs access to podinfo to scrape metrics, create an ingress-monitoring-prometheus.yaml file with the following contents:

{{- if and .Values.networkPolicies.enabled .Values.monitoring.enabled }}
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: ingress-monitoring-prometheus
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  ingress:
  - from:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          app.kubernetes.io/name: monitoring
      podSelector:
        matchLabels:
          app: prometheus
    ports:
    # Port numbers will vary, dependent on the pod
    - port: 9797  
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/name: podinfo
{{- end }}

Additional Configuration💣

Sample chart/values.yaml code at the package level:

# BigBang specific Network Policy Configuration
networkPolicies:
  enabled: false

  # See `kubectl cluster-info` and then resolve to IP
  controlPlaneCidr: 0.0.0.0/0

  ingressLabels: 
    app: istio-ingressgateway
    istio: ingressgateway
  • Use the enabled: false code above in order to disable networkPolicy templates for the package. The networkPolicy templates will be enabled by default when deployed from BigBang because it will inherit the networkPolicies.enabled value.
  • The ingressLabels portion supports packages that have an externally accessible UIs. Values from BigBang will also be inherited in this portion to ensure traffic from the correct istio ingressgateway is whitelisted.

Example of a BigBang value configuration, bigbang/templates/podinfo/values.yaml, when adding a package into BigBang with networkPolicies:

networkPolicies:
  enabled: {{ .Values.networkPolicies.enabled }}
  ingressLabels:
    {{- $gateway := default "public" .Values.addons.podinfo.ingress.gateway }}
    {{- $default := dict "app" (dig "gateways" $gateway "ingressGateway" nil .Values.istio) "istio" nil }}
    {{- toYaml (dig "values" "gateways" $gateway "selector" $default .Values.istio) | nindent 4 }}
  controlPlaneCidr: {{ .Values.networkPolicies.controlPlaneCidr }}
  • If the package needs to talk to the kube-api service (eg: operators) then the controlPlaneCidr value will be required.
  • The controlPlaneCidr will control egress to the kube-api and be wide open by default, but will inherit the networkPolicies.controlPlaneCidr value from BigBang so the range can be locked down.

Sample chart/templates/bigbang/networkpolicies/egress-kube-api.yaml:

{{- if .Values.networkPolicies.enabled }}
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: egress-kube-api
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  egress:
  - to:
    - ipBlock:
        cidr: {{ .Values.networkPolicies.controlPlaneCidr }}
        {{- if eq .Values.networkPolicies.controlPlaneCidr "0.0.0.0/0" }}
        # ONLY Block requests to cloud metadata IP
        except:
        - 169.254.169.254/32
        {{- end }}
  policyTypes:
  - Egress
{{- end }}

Validation💣

  • Package functions as expected and is able to communicate with all BigBang touchpoints.
Last update: 2023-10-02 by Christopher O'Connell