Know Your Kubernetes Deploys

Thursday, 2018, August 30 - 09:5510:30

Felix Glaser, Shopify


Containers changed the way we develop and package our code. Kubernetes made it easy to deploy and orchestrate our workloads. Now that those steps are well understood, it is time to draw attention to securing the software supply chain. This talk shows how Shopify secures and tracks its workloads.

We secure our software supply chain by creating signatures on our containers which state that they originate from the correct deploy pipeline, got tested and contain no known vulnerabilities or outdated software.

During deployment we use an admission controller that enables us to enforce deploy time policies that check the presence of the before created signatures so that we prevent privilege escalation via code deployment.

Since new exploits show up all the time, we need to add another piece to the puzzle to sure containers: a place to track all the metadata created during the lifetime of a container. For example, where it's deployed so that if it becomes vulnerable it gets pulled out of production, fixed, and redeployed.

Felix Glaser, Shopify

Felix likes to climb, cycle, and code. He does the first two outside. And the last but not least at Shopify, where he works on securing containers and their deployment into the cloud.

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@inproceedings {218871,
author = {Felix Glaser},
title = {Know Your Kubernetes Deploys},
year = {2018},
address = {Dusseldorf},
url = {},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = aug,

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