All Roads Lead to GKE's Host: 4+ Ways to Escape Google Kubernetes Engine
Billy Jheng and Muhammad Ramdhan demonstrate multiple novel container escape vectors in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to achieve host node takeover.
Summary
The Threat Model of Managed Kubernetes in the Cloud
In multi-tenant managed Kubernetes services like GKE, container boundaries must prevent untrusted workloads from escaping to underlying virtual machine nodes.
Analyzing GKE Node Agents and DaemonSets
Billy Jheng and Muhammad Ramdhan audit privileged background agents running on GKE nodes, discovering Unix socket exposure and shared host path mounts.
Four Novel Container Escape Attack Chains
The speakers walk through four distinct escape paths—exploiting containerd CRI bugs, fluentbit logging pipelines, metadata proxy bypasses, and kernel capabilities.
Remediation and Cloud Workload Hardening
The authors review Google's upstream security patches and demonstrate deploying GKE Sandbox (gVisor) and hardened node security profiles.
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