AWS EKS Security: Cluster Hardening and Workload Protection
Part of the Cybersecurity Skills Guide — This article is one deep-dive in our complete guide series.
By HADESS Team | February 28, 2026 | Updated: February 28, 2026 | 5 min read
EKS gives you managed Kubernetes on AWS, but “managed” does not mean “secured.” AWS handles the control plane, but you own the worker node configuration, network policies, IAM integration, pod security, and everything running inside the cluster. Here is what matters most.
IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)
IRSA is the correct way to give pods access to AWS services. Without it, teams fall back to attaching IAM roles to worker nodes, which means every pod on that node gets the same AWS permissions. That is a lateral movement gift.
IRSA works by associating a Kubernetes service account with an IAM role through an OIDC identity provider. Each pod gets its own temporary credentials scoped to exactly the permissions it needs. Set this up for every workload that talks to AWS APIs, and remove the node-level instance role permissions for anything except ECR pulls and basic EC2 operations.
Pod Security Standards
Kubernetes Pod Security Standards replaced PodSecurityPolicies (removed in 1.25). EKS supports the built-in Pod Security Admission controller with three profiles: Privileged, Baseline, and Restricted.
Apply Restricted to all production namespaces. This prevents privileged containers, host namespace sharing, host path mounts, and running as root. Apply Baseline as a minimum for development namespaces.
Enforce at the namespace level with labels:
“yaml apiVersion: v1 kind: Namespace metadata: name: production labels: pod-security.kubernetes.io/enforce: restricted pod-security.kubernetes.io/warn: restricted `
Network Policies
By default, every pod can talk to every other pod in an EKS cluster. Network policies fix this, but they only work if your CNI supports them. The VPC CNI plugin supports network policies natively since version 1.14.
Start with a default-deny policy in each namespace, then explicitly allow the traffic flows your application needs. A microservice that only talks to a database and a cache should not be able to reach the Kubernetes API server or other namespaces.
Cluster Access and Authentication
Use aws-auth ConfigMap carefully -- or better, migrate to EKS access entries for managing cluster authentication. Restrict cluster admin access to a small group. Use Kubernetes RBAC to give teams access only to their namespaces.
Enable audit logging for the EKS control plane. Send API server, authenticator, and controller manager logs to CloudWatch. Build alerts for privilege escalation attempts: ClusterRoleBinding` creation, secret access from unexpected service accounts, and exec into pods.
Runtime Security
Deploy a runtime security tool (Falco, GuardDuty for EKS, or similar) to detect anomalous behavior inside containers: unexpected processes, shell spawning, network connections to unusual destinations, and filesystem modifications in read-only containers.
Next Steps
- Explore Kubernetes and container security topics in the skills library
- Run a skills assessment to find gaps in your container security knowledge
- Plan your career move with the salary calculator — container security roles command premium compensation
Related Guides in This Series
- Active Directory Security: Attack Paths and Hardening — HADESS | 2026
- AWS ALB Security: TLS, Authentication, and Access Controls — HADESS | 2026
- AWS CloudTrail: Log Analysis and Security Monitoring — HADESS | 2026
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