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@article{195981,
        author = {Neeraj Sharma and Chandrabhan and Tanay Sinha and Gopal Khorwal},
        title = {SECURITY CHALLENGES AND SOLUTION IN KUBERNETES CLUSTER MANAGEMENT},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2049-2056},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=195981},
        abstract = {Kubernetes has rapidly emerged as the dominant platform for container orchestration in enterprise and cloud-native environments. While the platform offers compelling benefits in terms of workload automation and operational scalability, its inherent architectural complexity gives rise to a significant and frequently underestimated security exposure. This study investigates five categories of security vulnerabilities commonly observed in production Kubernetes deployments: improperly scoped Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) configurations, publicly reachable API server endpoints, container images carrying unpatched known vulnerabilities, inadequately protected inter-pod network channels, and insecure handling of sensitive configuration data. Rather than cataloguing these issues in isolation, the paper proposes a cohesive, five-layer security framework built around the principle of defense in depth. The framework brings together proven open-source tooling — Trivy for vulnerability scanning, Cosign for supply chain integrity, OPA/Gatekeeper for policy enforcement, Falco for runtime behavioral monitoring, HashiCorp Vault for secrets management, and Istio for encrypted service communication — into a structured, actionable security posture. The framework was evaluated against a simulated cluster environment using representative attack scenarios drawn from the MITRE ATT&CK for Containers matrix, yielding measurable improvements in threat containment and access boundary enforcement. The findings are intended to provide a practically grounded reference for DevOps engineers, security practitioners, and researchers engaged in cloud-native infrastructure protection.},
        keywords = {Kubernetes Security, Container Orchestration, RBAC, DevSecOps, Pod Security Admission, Service Mesh, Runtime Threat Detection, Cloud-Native Security},
        month = {April},
        }