Artifact Repository and Image Security

You locked down RBAC, encrypted your Secrets, and hardened your nodes. Then someone deployed an image with a known critical CVE because nobody checked what was inside the container. The supply chain is the gap most teams leave wide open.

Container images sit at the intersection of build and deploy. Every image you pull into your cluster is code you're running in production, and if you can't verify where it came from, what it contains, and whether it's been tampered with, your cluster security model has a hole at its foundation. The KCSA exam covers Artifact Repository and Image Security within the Cloud Native Security domain (14%), and the concepts here also feed directly into the Platform Security domain's Supply Chain Security and Admission Control topics.