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The kubelet —rotate-server-certificates argument should be set to true so the kubelet automatically requests and rotates its serving certificates. Disabling this increases exposure to expired or compromised server certificates.

Risk Level

High

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

  • CIS OKE

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

Manual Steps

  1. On every worker node, open the kubelet systemd drop-in config for editing:
  2. In the ExecStart= line, ensure the kubelet is started with --rotate-server-certificates=true. Add it if missing, or change false to true, for example:
  3. If the kubelet also uses a config file (e.g. /etc/kubernetes/kubelet-config.json), check it for a conflicting setting and remove or align it. For example, if present, update this key to true or delete it so the flag above is authoritative:
    Ensure either this field is set true or absent:
  4. Reload systemd and restart kubelet on the same worker node:
  5. Confirm kubelet is healthy on the worker node:
  6. Verify the argument is now set to true on the worker node (repeat on all workers):
    The output must include --rotate-server-certificates=true.
kubectl cannot modify kubelet process flags or host-level config files such as /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/00-default.conf or /etc/kubernetes/kubelet-config.json on worker nodes. To enable --rotate-server-certificates=true, make the change directly on each worker node as described in the Manual Steps section.