The load balancer stood between the cluster and the outside world, a silent gatekeeper. Misconfigure it, and the gate falls wide open.
This is Kubernetes Ingress security in its raw form: a set of rules that decide which requests get in and how they travel through your services. An insecure configuration here can expose APIs, leak data, or open paths for denial-of-service attacks. Reviewing Ingress security is not optional—it is the shield edge.
Ingress Controller Risks
Different controllers—NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy—have different defaults. Some ship with permissive rules. Some ignore certain annotations unless configured. Audit your controller before deployment. Check TLS enforcement, HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects, and allowed hostnames. If external traffic bypasses these gates, your internal services become public.
TLS and Certificate Management
Always terminate TLS at the Ingress. Use strong ciphers and modern protocols like TLS 1.3. Automate renewal with cert-manager, but inspect whether your certificate secrets are correctly scoped and not mountable by other pods. Expired or stolen certificates undermine encryption instantly.
Restrict Paths and Hosts
Limit Ingress resources to exact hosts and paths. Wildcard hosts and regex paths expand your attack surface. Map each domain to the minimum routes required and ensure default backends return 404 for unknown requests.