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More Info:

The kubelet kubeconfig file should have permissions of 644 or more restrictive. Loose permissions could allow unauthorized users to read or alter the kubelets cluster credentials.

Risk Level

Medium

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

  • CIS OKE

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

Manual Steps

  1. On every worker node, check the current permissions of the kubelet kubeconfig file:
  2. If the file exists and permissions are more permissive than 644 (e.g., 664, 666, 777), set them to 644:
  3. Ensure the file is owned by the kubelet user and group (commonly root:root; adjust if your environment differs):
  4. Repeat steps 1–3 on each worker node in the cluster.
  5. Verification (on every worker node):
    Confirm the output shows:
This file’s permissions are set on each worker node’s filesystem and cannot be changed via kubectl or any Kubernetes API object. To remediate, adjust the file mode directly on the node (host-level fix); see the Manual Steps section for the exact commands to run on every worker node.