Kubernetes RBAC: We Audited 40+ Clusters -- Here's What's Broken

After auditing more than 40 Kubernetes clusters for healthcare, fintech, SaaS, and enterprise clients, we can say with confidence that RBAC is the single most misconfigured aspect of Kubernetes security. Not network policies. Not pod security. RBAC.

The numbers back this up. According to Red Hat’s State of Kubernetes Security report, 90% of organisations experienced at least one container or Kubernetes security incident, and over 50% cite misconfigurations as the leading cause. Sysdig’s 2025 usage report found that machine identities outnumber humans 40,000 to 1 in cloud-native environments — and every one of those identities carries RBAC permissions that most teams never review. Research from Wiz shows that new AKS clusters face their first attack attempt within 18 minutes of creation. That means your RBAC configuration needs to be right from the start, not something you “get to later.”

This guide covers the exact misconfigurations we find repeatedly, the tools we use to detect them, and the patterns we implement to fix them at scale.

The 8 Most Dangerous RBAC Misconfigurations

These are not theoretical risks. We have encountered every single one of these in production clusters during our audits. They are listed roughly in order of severity based on how quickly an attacker can exploit them.

1. Wildcard Permissions on Verbs and Resources

The most common and most dangerous misconfiguration we encounter. Wildcard rules grant access to every verb on every resource, including future resources that do not exist yet.

# DANGEROUS: Found in 60% of clusters we audit
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: "developer-role"
rules:
- apiGroups: ["*"]
  resources: ["*"]
  verbs: ["*"]

This effectively grants cluster-admin privileges without being named cluster-admin, which means it bypasses most scanning tools that only flag explicit cluster-admin bindings. When we find this, it is usually a “temporary” rule that someone created during development and never removed.

2. Cluster-Admin Bindings to Users and Service Accounts

The built-in cluster-admin ClusterRole grants unrestricted access to every resource in every namespace. In our audits, we routinely find 5-15 cluster-admin bindings per cluster, most of which are unnecessary.

# Found in nearly every cluster we audit
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: developer-admin-binding
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
- kind: User
  name: developer@company.com

The Kubernetes RBAC Good Practices documentation explicitly warns against this. Cluster-admin should be reserved for break-glass emergency access with time-limited credentials, not day-to-day development.

3. Default Service Account Token Automounting

Every namespace in Kubernetes has a default service account. Unless explicitly disabled, every pod in that namespace mounts its token automatically. If a pod is compromised, the attacker immediately has whatever permissions that service account carries.

# Fix: Disable automounting at the ServiceAccount level
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: default
  namespace: production
automountServiceAccountToken: false

We found automounting enabled on default service accounts in 87% of the clusters we audited. Combined with overly permissive RBAC on those accounts, this creates a straightforward privilege escalation path. If you are not deliberately managing this, review our guide on common Kubernetes security mistakes and how to avoid them.

4. Escalate, Bind, and Impersonate Verbs

These three verbs are what the Kubernetes documentation calls “privilege escalation prevention” controls. If a subject has the escalate verb on roles, they can grant themselves any permission — even permissions they do not currently hold. The bind verb allows creating rolebindings to any role, and impersonate allows acting as any user or group.

# DANGEROUS: Grants ability to escalate own privileges
rules:
- apiGroups: ["rbac.authorization.k8s.io"]
  resources: ["clusterroles"]
  verbs: ["escalate", "bind"]
---
# DANGEROUS: Grants ability to impersonate any user
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["users", "groups", "serviceaccounts"]
  verbs: ["impersonate"]

As Aqua Security’s research on RBAC privilege escalation details, impersonating the system:masters group grants full cluster-admin access immediately. We have found these verbs granted unnecessarily in CI/CD service accounts that only need deployment permissions.

5. Secrets Access as a Privilege Escalation Vector

Granting list or get access to secrets across all namespaces is effectively granting cluster-admin access. Why? Because service account tokens are stored as secrets. An attacker who can list all secrets can retrieve any service account token in the cluster, including those bound to cluster-admin.

# DANGEROUS: Can read every secret in the cluster
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["secrets"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]

This is a frequently overlooked escalation path. For a detailed breakdown of secrets-related security issues, see our analysis of Kubernetes secrets security mistakes found across 50+ production clusters.

6. Node/Proxy Subresource Bypass

The nodes/proxy subresource grants direct access to the Kubelet API on worker nodes, completely bypassing the Kubernetes API server’s admission control, audit logging, and RBAC enforcement. Aqua Security’s research on Kubelet API exploitation demonstrated how this permission, commonly granted to monitoring tools, can be abused to execute arbitrary commands inside any pod on the node.

# DANGEROUS: Bypasses API server controls entirely
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["nodes/proxy"]
  verbs: ["get", "create"]

If your monitoring stack requires node-level access, scope it to specific node metrics endpoints rather than granting blanket nodes/proxy permissions.

7. Helm Chart and Operator Default Permissions

Helm charts and Kubernetes operators frequently ship with overly permissive RBAC defaults. We have audited charts from well-known projects that request cluster-admin or wildcard permissions when they only need access to a handful of resources in a single namespace.

Common offenders include:

• Monitoring stacks requesting secrets access across all namespaces
• Ingress controllers with wildcard verb permissions
• CI/CD operators with cluster-wide create and delete on all resources
• Logging agents with nodes/proxy access

Always review the RBAC manifests in any Helm chart before deploying. Run helm template and inspect every Role, ClusterRole, RoleBinding, and ClusterRoleBinding before they reach your cluster.

8. Stale Bindings and Orphaned Service Accounts

Employees leave. Projects are decommissioned. Service accounts are created for one-off tasks. The bindings remain. In our audits, we typically find 20-40% of role bindings referencing subjects that no longer exist or no longer need access.

# Find bindings referencing non-existent service accounts
kubectl get rolebindings,clusterrolebindings -A -o json | \
  jq -r '.items[] | select(.subjects[]?.kind=="ServiceAccount") |
  .subjects[] | "\(.namespace)/\(.name)"' | sort -u

Stale bindings are not just clutter — they are attack surface. If an attacker can recreate a deleted service account with the same name in the same namespace, they inherit all of its previous bindings.

Least Privilege Implementation

The principle of least privilege is easy to state and difficult to implement. Here are concrete before-and-after examples from our engagements.

Bad: Overly Broad Developer Role

# What we typically find
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: developer
rules:
- apiGroups: ["", "apps", "batch"]
  resources: ["*"]
  verbs: ["*"]

Good: Scoped Developer Role

# What we implement
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: developer
  namespace: team-alpha
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["pods", "pods/log", "pods/portforward", "services", "configmaps"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]
- apiGroups: ["apps"]
  resources: ["deployments", "replicasets"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["pods/exec"]
  verbs: ["create"]
  # Only in non-production namespaces

Key differences: namespace-scoped instead of cluster-wide, explicit resource lists instead of wildcards, read-only by default with exec only where needed. For more on namespace-based isolation strategies, see our guide on Kubernetes namespaces and how to use them effectively.

Service Account Least Privilege

Every workload should have its own service account with only the permissions it requires.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: order-processor
  namespace: production
automountServiceAccountToken: true  # Only when needed
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: order-processor-role
  namespace: production
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["configmaps"]
  resourceNames: ["order-config"]  # Specific resource names
  verbs: ["get", "watch"]
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["secrets"]
  resourceNames: ["order-db-credentials"]
  verbs: ["get"]

Notice the use of resourceNames to restrict access to specific ConfigMaps and Secrets rather than all resources of that type. This is a pattern we strongly recommend but rarely see in the wild.

RBAC vs ABAC vs OPA: Choosing the Right Model

Kubernetes supports multiple authorisation models. Understanding when to use each — and how to combine them — is critical for mature security postures.

Feature	RBAC	ABAC	OPA/Gatekeeper
Configuration	Kubernetes-native YAML	Static JSON policy files	Rego policies via CRDs
Granularity	Role-based (who can do what)	Attribute-based (context-aware)	Policy-based (arbitrary logic)
Dynamic updates	Yes, via API	Requires API server restart	Yes, via CRDs
Audit trail	Kubernetes audit logs	Kubernetes audit logs	OPA decision logs + K8s audit
Learning curve	Moderate	Low (but limited)	High (Rego language)
Scale	Role explosion at scale	Hard to manage	Scales well with templates
Use case	Identity-to-permission mapping	Simple attribute checks	Complex, context-aware policies
K8s support	First-class, enabled by default	Deprecated, not recommended	Third-party via Gatekeeper

Our Recommended Hybrid Approach

Based on our experience across 40+ clusters, we recommend this layered strategy:

1. RBAC as the foundation — Handle all identity-to-permission mappings. Define who can access what resources and with which verbs. This covers 80-90% of access control requirements.

2. OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno for policy enforcement — Use admission controllers for rules that RBAC cannot express: “Pods must not run as root,” “Images must come from approved registries,” “Namespaces must have resource quotas.” Kyverno is an increasingly popular alternative to OPA for teams that prefer YAML over Rego.

3. Avoid ABAC entirely — Kubernetes ABAC requires static JSON files on the API server node and an API server restart to update. It is effectively deprecated in favour of RBAC and admission controllers. We have never encountered a use case where ABAC was the right choice.

Auditing Your RBAC: Step-by-Step Workflow

This is the exact workflow we follow when auditing a client’s RBAC configuration. Each step builds on the previous one.

Step 1: Scan for Risky Permissions with KubiScan

KubiScan by CyberArk identifies risky roles, bindings, and service accounts based on a configurable risk model.

# Install KubiScan
git clone https://github.com/cyberark/KubiScan.git
cd KubiScan && pip install -r requirements.txt

# List all risky subjects (users, service accounts, groups)
python3 KubiScan.py -rs

# List all risky roles and clusterroles
python3 KubiScan.py -rr

# Show risky bindings for a specific service account
python3 KubiScan.py -aars "monitoring-sa" -ns "monitoring" -k "ServiceAccount"

KubiScan uses a risky_roles.yaml configuration file that defines what constitutes a risky permission. We customise this file for each client based on their threat model.

Step 2: Query Specific Permissions with kubectl-who-can

The kubectl-who-can plugin answers the question: “Who can perform this action?”

# Install via krew
kubectl krew install who-can

# Who can create pods in the default namespace?
kubectl who-can create pods -n default

# Who can list secrets cluster-wide?
kubectl who-can list secrets --all-namespaces

# Who can exec into pods?
kubectl who-can create pods/exec -n production

# Who can escalate ClusterRoles?
kubectl who-can escalate clusterroles

We run these queries for every high-risk verb and resource combination, then cross-reference the results against the client’s intended access model.

Step 3: Comprehensive Security Scan with Kubescape

Kubescape by ARMO provides a broader security assessment, including RBAC-specific controls mapped to the NSA/CISA Kubernetes hardening guide and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

# Install Kubescape
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubescape/kubescape/master/install.sh | /bin/bash

# Run RBAC-focused scan
kubescape scan framework nsa --include-namespaces default,production,staging

# Scan specific RBAC controls
kubescape scan control C-0035,C-0036,C-0037,C-0038,C-0039

# Export results as JSON for further analysis
kubescape scan framework mitre -f json -o rbac-audit-results.json

Kubescape identifies not just RBAC issues but also how they interact with other misconfigurations — for example, an overly permissive service account combined with a pod that mounts the host filesystem.

Step 4: Generate Least-Privilege Roles with audit2rbac

audit2rbac analyses Kubernetes audit logs and generates the minimum RBAC roles needed for observed API requests.

# Ensure audit logging is enabled (API server flag)
# --audit-policy-file=/etc/kubernetes/audit-policy.yaml
# --audit-log-path=/var/log/kubernetes/audit.log

# Generate RBAC for a specific user
audit2rbac --filename=audit.log --user=developer@company.com

# Generate RBAC for a service account
audit2rbac --filename=audit.log \
  --serviceaccount=monitoring:prometheus-server

This is particularly valuable for tightening permissions on existing workloads. Run the workload with broad permissions in a staging environment, capture the audit log, then use audit2rbac to generate a role containing only the permissions actually used.

Step 5: Validate with Polaris

Polaris by Fairwinds validates Kubernetes configurations against best practices, including RBAC-related checks.

# Run Polaris audit
polaris audit --format=pretty

# Run with custom checks focused on RBAC
polaris audit --checks=rbac --format=json

We also recommend rbac-tool for visualising RBAC relationships and generating policy reports:

# Install rbac-tool
kubectl krew install rbac-tool

# Visualise RBAC as a graph
kubectl rbac-tool viz --outformat dot | dot -Tpng -o rbac-graph.png

# Audit permissions for a subject
kubectl rbac-tool lookup developer@company.com

# Generate an RBAC policy report
kubectl rbac-tool policy-rules -e '^system:'

RBAC at Scale: Patterns for Multi-Cluster Environments

Managing RBAC across a single cluster is challenging. Managing it across 10, 50, or 100 clusters requires deliberate architectural patterns.

Aggregated ClusterRoles

Kubernetes supports ClusterRole aggregation, which lets you compose roles from smaller, reusable building blocks using label selectors.

# Base role: read-only access to core resources
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: monitoring-base
  labels:
    rbac.tasrie.com/aggregate-to-monitoring: "true"
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["pods", "services", "endpoints"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]
---
# Extension: add metrics access
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: monitoring-metrics
  labels:
    rbac.tasrie.com/aggregate-to-monitoring: "true"
rules:
- apiGroups: ["metrics.k8s.io"]
  resources: ["pods", "nodes"]
  verbs: ["get", "list"]
---
# Aggregated role: automatically combines the above
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: monitoring-full
aggregationRule:
  clusterRoleSelectors:
  - matchLabels:
      rbac.tasrie.com/aggregate-to-monitoring: "true"
rules: []  # Rules are automatically filled by the controller

Aggregation prevents role explosion by letting you define small, composable permission sets and combine them as needed. When a new component needs monitoring access, you add a labelled ClusterRole rather than editing a monolithic role.

GitOps-Based RBAC Management

RBAC manifests should live in Git, go through pull request review, and be deployed via a GitOps controller like ArgoCD or Flux. This gives you version history, peer review, and automatic drift detection.

rbac-repo/
  base/
    cluster-roles/
      developer.yaml
      operator.yaml
      monitoring.yaml
    namespace-templates/
      team-namespace.yaml
  overlays/
    production/
      kustomization.yaml
      bindings.yaml
    staging/
      kustomization.yaml
      bindings.yaml

For detailed guidance on implementing GitOps workflows with ArgoCD, see our DevOps Kubernetes playbook covering GitOps, Helm, and ArgoCD.

Namespace Templates

We use namespace templates to ensure consistent RBAC across all team namespaces. When a new team namespace is created, it automatically receives:

# Template applied to every new team namespace
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: default
automountServiceAccountToken: false
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: team-developers
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: developer-namespaced
subjects:
- kind: Group
  name: team-${TEAM_NAME}-developers
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-deny-all
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  - Egress

This ensures that every namespace starts with disabled automounting on the default service account, a standardised developer role binding, and a default-deny network policy. Consistency at this level is what prevents the configuration drift that leads to the misconfigurations we discussed earlier.

Mitigating Role Explosion

Role explosion occurs when the number of distinct roles grows unmanageably as you add teams, namespaces, and services. Strategies to prevent it:

• Use aggregated ClusterRoles to compose permissions from reusable building blocks
• Bind to groups, not individual users — a single group binding serves all team members
• Standardise on 4-5 role tiers (viewer, developer, operator, admin, cluster-admin) and customise per namespace rather than per user
• Audit and prune quarterly — remove bindings for subjects that have not authenticated in 90 days

Identity Provider Integration

Hardcoded usernames and client certificates do not scale. Every production cluster should authenticate through an external identity provider using OpenID Connect (OIDC).

How OIDC Authentication Works with Kubernetes

The OIDC flow for Kubernetes authentication works as follows:

1. The user authenticates with the identity provider (Keycloak, Dex, Azure AD, Okta)
2. The IdP issues a JWT containing the user’s identity and group memberships
3. kubectl sends the JWT as a bearer token with each API request
4. The API server validates the token against the IdP’s signing keys
5. RBAC rules evaluate based on the user’s identity and groups from the JWT claims

API Server Configuration

# API server flags for OIDC
kube-apiserver \
  --oidc-issuer-url=https://keycloak.company.com/realms/kubernetes \
  --oidc-client-id=kubernetes \
  --oidc-username-claim=email \
  --oidc-groups-claim=groups \
  --oidc-username-prefix="oidc:" \
  --oidc-groups-prefix="oidc:"

The prefixes prevent collision between OIDC identities and Kubernetes system identities. Without them, an OIDC user whose group claim includes system:masters would have full cluster-admin access.

Choosing an Identity Provider

Provider	Best For	Considerations
Keycloak	On-premises, full IdP control	Self-hosted, requires operational overhead
Dex	Lightweight, multi-upstream federation	Minimal footprint, config-driven
Azure AD	AKS clusters, Microsoft ecosystem	Native integration with AKS
Google Identity	GKE clusters, Google Workspace	Native integration with GKE
AWS IAM + IRSA	EKS clusters	AWS-native, no external IdP needed

Group-Based Bindings

Once OIDC is configured, bind roles to groups rather than individual users. Group membership is managed in the IdP, not in Kubernetes manifests.

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: platform-team-admin
  namespace: platform
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: admin
subjects:
- kind: Group
  name: "oidc:platform-engineering"
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io

When an engineer joins or leaves the platform team, you update their group membership in Keycloak or your IdP of choice. No Kubernetes manifests need to change.

RBAC for CI/CD Pipelines

CI/CD pipelines are the most over-privileged identities in most clusters. They typically run with cluster-admin because “it’s easier,” creating a massive blast radius if a pipeline is compromised.

Scoped Roles for ArgoCD

ArgoCD supports project-level RBAC that restricts what each project can deploy and where.

# ArgoCD AppProject with scoped permissions
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: AppProject
metadata:
  name: team-alpha
  namespace: argocd
spec:
  description: "Team Alpha applications"
  sourceRepos:
  - "https://github.com/company/team-alpha-*"
  destinations:
  - namespace: "team-alpha-*"
    server: "https://kubernetes.default.svc"
  clusterResourceWhitelist:
  - group: ""
    kind: Namespace
  namespaceResourceWhitelist:
  - group: "apps"
    kind: Deployment
  - group: ""
    kind: Service
  - group: ""
    kind: ConfigMap

The Kubernetes ServiceAccount that ArgoCD uses should be equally scoped:

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: argocd-team-alpha
  namespace: team-alpha-production
rules:
- apiGroups: ["apps"]
  resources: ["deployments", "replicasets"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch", "create", "update", "patch"]
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["services", "configmaps"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch", "create", "update", "patch"]
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["secrets"]
  resourceNames: ["team-alpha-tls", "team-alpha-registry"]
  verbs: ["get"]

Scoped Roles for Flux

Flux’s multi-tenancy model uses Kubernetes service accounts per tenant, each with namespace-scoped permissions.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: flux-team-beta
  namespace: team-beta
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: flux-team-beta
  namespace: team-beta
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: flux-tenant
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: flux-team-beta
  namespace: team-beta

GitHub Actions Runners

GitHub Actions runners in Kubernetes should use dedicated service accounts with the minimum permissions required for the specific pipeline.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: gh-actions-deployer
  namespace: ci-cd
automountServiceAccountToken: true
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: gh-actions-deployer
  namespace: production
rules:
- apiGroups: ["apps"]
  resources: ["deployments"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "patch"]
  resourceNames: ["web-app", "api-server"]  # Only specific deployments
- apiGroups: ["apps"]
  resources: ["deployments/rollback"]
  verbs: ["create"]
  resourceNames: ["web-app", "api-server"]

Jenkins Pipeline Service Accounts

Jenkins pipelines are historically the worst offenders for over-privileged access. Scope each pipeline’s service account to exactly the resources it deploys.

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: jenkins-deploy-api
  namespace: production
rules:
- apiGroups: ["apps"]
  resources: ["deployments"]
  verbs: ["get", "update", "patch"]
  resourceNames: ["api-service"]
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources: ["pods"]
  verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]  # For deployment status checks only

The pattern across all CI/CD tools is the same: one service account per pipeline, namespace-scoped roles, explicit resource names where possible, and no access to secrets unless absolutely required.

Putting It All Together: An RBAC Hardening Checklist

Based on our audit experience, here is the prioritised checklist we work through with every client:

Immediate (Week 1):

• Remove all unnecessary cluster-admin bindings
• Disable automounting on all default service accounts
• Scan for wildcard permissions and replace with explicit rules
• Audit for escalate, bind, and impersonate verbs
• Review secrets access and scope to specific resourceNames

Short-term (Weeks 2-4):

• Implement OIDC authentication with group-based bindings
• Create scoped service accounts for all CI/CD pipelines
• Deploy OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno for policy enforcement
• Enable Kubernetes audit logging at the Metadata level
• Run KubiScan and Kubescape scans, remediate findings

Ongoing (Monthly/Quarterly):

• Review and prune stale bindings
• Validate RBAC against audit logs using audit2rbac
• Update roles as workloads change
• Test break-glass procedures for emergency access
• Review Helm chart RBAC before upgrades

For a broader view of Kubernetes security beyond RBAC, our comprehensive guide covers Kubernetes security best practices including network policies, runtime security, and compliance.

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Secure Your Kubernetes Clusters with Expert RBAC Auditing

RBAC misconfigurations are not just compliance failures — they are active attack vectors. With new clusters facing exploitation attempts within minutes of creation and machine identities outnumbering human users by orders of magnitude, getting RBAC right is foundational to every other security control you implement.

Our team provides comprehensive Kubernetes consulting services to help you:

• Audit and remediate RBAC misconfigurations across single and multi-cluster environments, using the same tooling and methodology described in this guide
• Implement identity provider integration with OIDC, group-based bindings, and automated provisioning that scales with your organisation
• Establish GitOps-based RBAC governance with version-controlled policies, automated drift detection, and continuous compliance validation

We have audited and hardened RBAC configurations for healthcare organisations handling patient data, fintech platforms processing millions in transactions, and enterprise SaaS providers managing hundreds of namespaces. The patterns in this guide come directly from that experience.

Talk to our Kubernetes security team about an RBAC audit —>