Overview
Internship preparing for Hackvens, an event organized by Advens, focused on Kubernetes and IoT vulnerabilities. The purpose of the internship was to prepare this final restitution/challenge by identifying technical flaws, connecting them to operational risks, then formalizing findings into a detection and remediation playbook.
Event Context
The context involved realistic offensive and defensive security scenarios prepared ahead of Hackvens. The goal was not only to find a flaw, but to understand its concrete impact: what it enables for an attacker, which assets are exposed, and which measures are needed to reduce the risk.
Tested Environments
Kubernetes Infrastructure
I worked on several scenarios involving vulnerable Kubernetes usage:
- Privilege escalation via RBAC: Exploiting overly permissive permissions
- Secret extraction: Retrieving credentials stored in Kubernetes secrets
- Privileged pods: Using pods with elevated privileges to compromise the host node
- Service accounts: Exploiting service accounts with excessive permissions
IoT Devices
IoT challenges included:
- Firmware analysis to identify backdoors
- Exploitation of unsecured protocols (MQTT, HTTP)
- Interception and manipulation of device communications
- Access to unprotected admin interfaces
Techniques and Tools Used
Reconnaissance and Enumeration
# Network scan with nmap
nmap -sV -sC -p- target-ip
# Kubernetes enumeration
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
kubectl auth can-i --list
Exploitation
- Metasploit Framework for automated exploitation
- Burp Suite for HTTP request analysis and manipulation
- kubectl for cluster interaction
- Docker for image and container analysis
Documentation and Remediation
Findings were structured into a detection and remediation playbook: observable symptoms, likely causes, associated impact and priority corrective actions.
Applied Methodology
- Reconnaissance: Information gathering about the target
- Scanning: Service and vulnerability identification
- Exploitation: Exploiting identified flaws
- Impact analysis: Connecting technical flaws to operational risk
- Documentation: Writing a detection and remediation playbook
Lessons Learned
About Kubernetes Security
- The importance of the principle of least privilege
- Dangers of unsecured default configurations
- The necessity of properly configured Network Policies
- The importance of securing secrets and using solutions like Vault
About IoT
- Many IoT devices lack basic security
- Unencrypted protocols are still widely used
- The importance of regular firmware updates
- The need to segment the IoT network
Reflections
This experience confirmed that security must be built-in from design (Security by Design) rather than added as an afterthought. It also reminded me of the importance of staying humble - even systems that seem secure can have hidden flaws.
This experience also taught me to communicate technical discoveries effectively: a vulnerability is only useful to address when its impact, likelihood and remediation are understandable by the people who need to act.