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Release notes

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes 3.71

Highlights what is new and what has changed with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes releases

Red Hat OpenShift Documentation Team

Abstract

The release notes for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes summarize all new features and enhancements, notable technical changes, deprecated and removed features, bug fixes, and any known bugs upon general availability.

Chapter 1. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes 3.71

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (RHACS) is an enterprise-ready, Kubernetes-native container security solution that protects your vital applications across build, deploy, and runtime. It deploys in your infrastructure and integrates with your DevOps tooling and workflows to deliver better security and compliance and to enable DevOps and InfoSec teams to operationalize security.

Important

Because of an unexpected schema change in an upstream vulnerability feed on 20 October 2022, Red Hat published a corrupted CVE data file to https://definitions.stackrox.io, and many Central instances downloaded the corrupted file. As a result, when Central processes the corrupted feed data, it fails and enters a CrashLoopBackOff state. Although Red Hat has already taken steps to fix the corrupted CVE data file, already affected Central instances do not automatically get out of the CrashLoopBackOff state. To get Central back to working condition, follow the instructions at Central in CrashLoopBackOff - 2022-10-20 Incident.

RHACS 3.71 includes:

  • A new top-level Dashboard to increase your efficiency
  • Two new default policies to help improve your security posture
  • Ability to set eBPF as the default collection method to boost performance
  • Additional feature enhancements and bug fixes

Table 1.1. Release dates

RHACS versionReleased on

3.71.0

25 July 2022

3.71.1

5 October 2022

3.71.2

17 October 2022

3.71.3

13 December 2022

1.1. New features

1.1.1. New RHACS Dashboard

RHACS introduces a new top-level Dashboard designed to provide quick access to the data you need. It provides additional navigation shortcuts and a panel of actionable widgets that are easy to filter and customize so that you can focus on what matters most to you. We would love to hear your feedback to help us shape future enhancements, including which widgets you would like on the Dashboard and how you would like to customize them.

The changes to the Dashboard in RHACS 3.71 are described in the following section. For more information, see Viewing the Dashboard.

1.1.1.2. Dashboard filter

The Dashboard now includes a top-level filter that applies simultaneously to all widgets. You can select one or more clusters, and one or more namespaces within selected clusters. When no clusters or namespaces are selected, the view automatically switches to All. Any change to the filter is immediately reflected by all widgets, limiting the data they present to the selected scope. The Dashboard filter does not affect the Status Bar.

1.1.1.3. Widget options

Some widgets are now customizable to help you focus on what matters the most to you. Widgets offer different controls that change how the data is sorted, allow you to filter the data, and help you to customize the widget’s output.

Widgets offer two ways to customize different aspects:

  • An Options menu, when present, provides specific options applicable to that widget.
  • A dynamic axis legend, when present, allows you to filter data by hiding one or more of the axis categories. For example, in the Policy violations by category widget, you can click on a severity to include or exclude respective violations from the data.
Note

Individual widget customization settings are short lived and are reset to the system default upon leaving the Dashboard.

1.1.1.4. Actionable widgets

The Dashboard provides the following actionable widgets:

  • Policy violations by severity: This widget shows the distribution of violations across severity levels for the Dashboard-filtered scope. Clicking a severity level in the chart takes you to the Violations page, filtered for that severity and scope. It also lists the three most recent violations of a Critical level policy within the scope you defined in the Dashboard filter. Clicking a specific violation takes you directly to the Violations detail page for that violation.
  • Images at most risk: This widget lists the top six vulnerable images within the Dashboard-filtered scope, sorted by their computed risk priority, along with the number of critical and important common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) they contain. Click an image name to go directly to the Image Findings page under Vulnerability Management. Use the Options menu to focus on fixable CVEs, or further focus on active images.

    Note

    When clusters or namespaces have been selected in the Dashboard filter, the data displayed is already filtered to active images, or images that are being used by deployments within the filtered scope.

  • Deployments at most risk: This widget provides the information that was previously available in the Top risky deployments widget, but displays additional information such as the resource location (cluster and namespace) and the risk priority score. Additionally, you can click on a deployment to view risk information about the deployment; for example, its policy violations and vulnerabilities.
  • Aging images: Older images present a higher security risk as they can contain vulnerabilities that have already been addressed. If older images are active, they can expose deployments to exploits. This widget allows you to quickly assess your security posture and identify offending images. You can use the default ranges or customize the age intervals with your own values. You can view both inactive and active images or use the Dashboard filter to focus on a particular area for active images. You can then click on an age group in this widget to view only those images in the Vulnerability ManagementImages page.
  • Policy violations by category: This widget can help you gain insights about the challenges your organization is facing in complying with security policies, by analyzing which types of policies are violated more than others. The widget shows the five policy categories of highest interest. Explore the Options menu for different ways to slice the data. You can filter the data to focus exclusively on deploy or runtime violations. You can also change the sorting mode. By default, the data is sorted by the number of violations within the highest severity first. Therefore, all categories with critical policies will appear before categories without critical policies. The other sorting mode considers the total number of violations regardless of severity. As some categories contain no critical policies (for example, “Docker CIS”), the two sorting modes can provide significantly different views, offering additional insight. Click on a severity level at the bottom of the graph to include or exclude that level from the data, potentially resulting in a different top five selection, as well as a different ranking order. Data is filtered to the scope selected by the Dashboard filter.
  • Compliance by standard: The Compliance widget is an improvement over a similar widget included in the past. It uses the Dashboard filter, allowing you to focus on areas that matter to you the most. The widget lists the top or bottom six compliance benchmarks, depending on sort order. Select Options to sort by the respective coverage percentage. Click on one of the benchmark labels or graphs to go directly to the Compliance Controls page, filtered by the Dashboard scope and the selected benchmark.

1.1.1.5. Removed widgets

  • Individual Policy Category widgets: Previous product versions included a set of widgets showing the distribution of policy violations across severity levels, per policy category. The widgets were automatically generated for every policy category. To view similar data, use the Policy violations by category widget and click a category to get to the same Violations page.
  • Active violations by time: Previous product versions included a line graph depicting the number of violations over a seven-day period. This graph has been removed with the understanding that more comprehensive historical metrics are desired. This topic is being considered as a product enhancement request.

1.1.2. New default policy for privilege escalation

This new default policy detects if a deployment is running with a container that has allowPrivilegeEscalation set to true. This policy is enabled by default. The privilege escalation setting is enabled in Kubernetes pods by default. A container process that can run with more privileges than its parent process can allow the container to run with unintended privileges, creating a security risk. This policy provides an alert so that you can verify whether privileged escalation is required. For example, it may be necessary if the required privileges cannot be provided with a subset of other controls.

1.1.3. New default policy for externally exposed service

This new policy detects if a deployment has any service that is externally exposed through any methods. The policy is disabled by default. Deployments with services exposed outside of the cluster are at a higher risk of attempted intrusions because they are reachable outside of the cluster. This policy provides an alert so that you can verify that service exposure outside of the cluster is required. If the service is only needed for intra-cluster communication, use service type ClusterIP.

1.1.4. Ability to assign multiple RHACS roles to users and groups

Role-based Access Control (RBAC) in RHACS has been enhanced to allow you to assign multiple roles to a single user or group. Previously, a key-value pair could only be assigned to a single role. Now, that key-value pair can be assigned to multiple RHACS roles. This change allows you to reuse existing roles and simplifies role management. For more information, see Managing RBAC in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes.

1.1.5. List of network policies in Deployment tab for violations

A new information section has been added to help resolve a "missing Kubernetes network policy" violation. When viewing a violation, select the Deployment tab and scroll to the new Network policy section. It lists all the Kubernetes network policies applicable to the namespace of the offending deployment. You can use this list to verify which network policies exist in the namespace to help you determine why a deployment was flagged as missing a network policy.

1.1.6. Alpine 3.16 support

Scanner now supports Alpine 3.16.

1.2. Enhancements

1.2.1. Change to roxctl image scan behavior

The default value for the --include-snoozed option of the roxctl image scan command is set to false. If the --include-snoozed option is set to false, the scan does not include snoozed CVEs.

1.2.2. Update to diagnostic bundles

You can create diagnostic bundles to assist Red Hat in supporting you with RHACS. This diagnostic bundle has been enhanced to include notifiers, auth providers and auth provider groups, access control roles with attached permission set and access scope, and system configuration information. Users with the DebugLogs permission can read listed entities from a generated diagnostic bundle regardless of their respective permissions.

1.2.3. Align OCP4-CIS scanning benchmarks control numbers

The CIS control number has been added to compliance scan results to enable customers to reference the original control from the CIS benchmark standard (ROX-9986).

1.3. Notable technical changes

1.3.1. eBPF is now the default collection method

In RHACS 3.71, Red Hat has updated the default collection method for Collector to eBPF. Using eBPF for data collection takes advantage of modern kernel features and improves performance over kernel modules by 25%. Additionally, it reduces processed syscall events by 99%.

Note

You should switch to kernel module collection if you are using:

  • OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11, which uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7. It does not support the features required for performance improvement.
  • SELinux on RHEL 7, which may also prevent the loading of eBPF probes.

1.3.2. Shutdown of Stackrox image registry sites

The image registries hosted at the stackrox.io and collector.stackrox.io addresses were shut down. Images for RHACS are available from registry.redhat.io.

1.4. Deprecated and removed features

Some features available in previous releases have been deprecated or removed.

Deprecated functionality is still included in RHACS and continues to be supported; however, it will be removed in a future release of this product and is not recommended for new deployments. For the most recent list of major functionality deprecated and removed, refer to the table below. Additional information about some removed or deprecated functionality is available after the table.

In the table, features are marked with the following statuses:

  • GA: General Availability
  • TP: Technology Preview
  • DEP: Deprecated
  • REM: Removed

Table 1.2. Deprecated and removed features tracker

FeatureRHACS 3.69RHACS 3.70RHACS 3.71

Ability to add comments to alerts and processes

DEP

DEP

REM

Anchore, Tenable, and Docker Trusted registry integrations

DEP

DEP

REM

External authorization plug-in for scoped access control

DEP

DEP

REM

FROM option in the Disallowed Dockerfile line policy field

GA

DEP

REM

PodSecurityPolicy (PSP) Kubernetes objects

GA

DEP

REM

RenamePolicyCategory and DeletePolicyCategory API endpoints

GA

DEP

DEP

--rhacs option for the roxctl helm output command

DEP

DEP

REM

/v1/nodes and /v1/images API endpoint response: firstNodeOccurrence response body parameter

DEP

DEP

REM

Permissions: AuthPlugin, AuthProvider, Group, Licenses, Role, User, Indicator, NetworkBaseline, ProcessWhitelist, Risk, APIToken, BackupPlugins, ImageIntegration, Notifier, SignatureIntegration, ImageComponent

GA

GA

DEP

Retrieving groups by property

GA

GA

DEP

vulns fields of storage.Node object in response payload of v1/nodes

GA

GA

DEP

/v1/cves/suppress and /v1/cves/unsuppress

GA

GA

DEP

ids field in the /v1/cves/suppress and /v1/cves/unsuppress API payload

GA

GA

DEP

cves.ids field of the storage.VulnerabilityRequest object in the response of VulnerabilityRequestService endpoints

GA

GA

DEP

1.4.1. Deprecated features

  • Permissions for permission sets will be grouped for simplification. The following list describes the new permissions and indicates the deprecated permissions that will be removed in a future release:

    • The Access permission will replace the following permissions: AuthPlugin, AuthProvider, Group, Licenses, Role, and User.
    • The DeploymentExtension permission will replace the following permissions: Indicator, NetworkBaseline, ProcessWhitelist, and Risk.
    • The Integration permission will deprecate the following permissions: APIToken, BackupPlugins, ImageIntegration, Notifier, and SignatureIntegration.
    • The Image permission will replace the permission ImageComponent.
  • Previously, groups were retrieved by the field props (props.authProviderId, props.key, props.value). This field will be replaced by the new props.id field. Use the props.id field to retrieve groups in the Application Programming Interface (API). Note the following:

    • Retrieval using the props fields will be removed in version a future release.
    • Until removal, retrieval using the props field will work if the result is unambiguous (no more than one group is found with the props field).
  • /v1/cves/suppress and /v1/cves/unsuppress have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. After these are removed:

    • Use /v1/imagecves/suppress and /v1/imagecves/unsuppress to snooze and unsnooze image vulnerabilities.
    • Use /v1/nodecves/suppress and /v1/nodecves/unsuppress to snooze and unsnooze node and host vulnerabilities.
    • Use /v1/clustercves/suppress and /v1/clustercves/unsuppress to snooze and unsnooze platform (Kubernetes, Istio, and OpenShift Container Platform) vulnerabilities.
  • Updated 30 August 2022:

    • The ids field in the /v1/cves/suppress and /v1/cves/unsuppress API payload will be renamed to cves in the RHACS 3.73 release.
    • The cves.ids field of the storage.VulnerabilityRequest object in the response of VulnerabilityRequestService endpoints will be renamed to cves.cves in the RHACS 3.73 release.

1.4.2. Removed features

  • Anchore, Tenable, and Docker Trusted Registry integrations: The RHACS scanner supersedes these integrations.
  • External authorization plug-in for scoped access control: Use the existing in-product scoped access control.
  • FROM option in the Disallowed Dockerfile line policy field: Any policies containing the Disallowed Dockerfile line policy field with the FROM option must be updated to remove those policy sections.
  • PodSecurityPolicies (PSPs): PSPs can be disabled when generating deployment bundles and when configuring the Helm charts. The Helm charts also support auto-sensing availability of the PodSecurityPolicies API. You must disable PSPs when deploying to Kubernetes version 1.25 or later.

1.5. Bug fixes

1.5.1. Resolved in version 3.71.3

Release date: 13 December 2022

  • Previously, if Central downloaded a corrupted CVE data file, it failed and entered a CrashLoopBackOff state. The patch release 3.71.3 fixes this issue.
  • This release contains security updates to address the following CVEs in the base images:

    • CVE-2022-3515: libksba Integer overflow may lead to remote code execution.
    • CVE-2022-42898: krb5 Integer overflow vulnerabilities in PAC parsing.

1.5.2. Resolved in version 3.71.2

Release date: 17 October 2022

  • Because of a bug in RHACS 3.72.0, the Collector pods previously stopped responding and reach a segmentation fault after allocating a memory block for the protocol buffer heap under certain load conditions. The patch release 3.71.2 fixes this issue.

1.5.3. Resolved in version 3.71.1

Release date: 5 October 2022

This release contains security updates to address the following CVEs in the base images:

  • CVE-2022-2526: systemd-resolved: use-after-free when dealing with DnsStream in resolved-dns-stream.c
  • CVE-2022-29154: rsync: remote arbitrary files write inside the directories of connecting peers

1.5.4. Resolved in version 3.71.0

Release date: 25 July 2022

  • The node affinity setting in Helm templates has been updated to discourage RHACS pods such as Central, Sensor, Scanner, and Scanner-db being scheduled on control plane nodes. (ROX-11533)
  • Because the FROM option in the Disallowed Dockerfile line policy field has been deprecated, this update removed the option to create or edit policies that include this field. (ROX-10925)

1.6. Upgrade instructions for roxctl users

If you are upgrading to RHACS 3.71 using the roxctl CLI and YAML files, you need to perform some additional steps to upgrade Scanner. For upgrade steps, see Upgrading Scanner.

1.7. Image versions

ImageDescriptionCurrent version

Main

Includes Central, Sensor, Admission Controller, and Compliance. Also includes roxctl for use in continuous integration (CI) systems.

registry.redhat.io/advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-main-rhel8:3.71.1

Scanner

Scans images and nodes.

registry.redhat.io/advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-scanner-rhel8:3.71.1

Scanner DB

Stores image scan results and vulnerability definitions.

registry.redhat.io/advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-scanner-db-rhel8:3.71.1

Collector

Collects runtime activity in Kubernetes or OpenShift Container Platform clusters.

  • registry.redhat.io/advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-collector-rhel8:3.71.1
  • registry.redhat.io/advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-collector-slim-rhel8:3.71.1

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