etcd Security and Encryption

Every Secret, RBAC binding, and workload spec in your cluster lives in etcd. Compromise it and you have root-equivalent access: read credentials, modify permissions, inject workloads, all without touching the Kubernetes API.

The Kubernetes documentation puts it plainly: "Access to etcd is equivalent to root permission in the cluster." This lesson covers the three layers that protect etcd: TLS for data in transit, encryption providers for data at rest, and network isolation to restrict who can reach it in the first place.