STIGUI
V-254554CAT II — Medium severitySV-254554r1043176_rule

RKE2 must use a centralized user management solution to support account management functions.

Rule version CNTR-R2-000030 · STIG v2 · 2026-05-13

Discussion

The Kubernetes Controller Manager is a background process that embeds core control loops regulating cluster system state through the API Server. Every process executed in a pod has an associated service account. By default, service accounts use the same credentials for authentication. Implementing the default settings poses a high risk to the Kubernetes Controller Manager. Setting the use-service-account-credential value lowers the attack surface by generating unique service accounts settings for each controller instance.

Check

Ensure use-service-account-credentials argument is set correctly.

Run this command on the RKE2 Control Plane: /bin/ps -ef | grep kube-controller-manager | grep -v grep

If --use-service-account-credentials argument is not set to "true" or is not configured, this is a finding.

Fix

Edit the RKE2 Configuration File /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml on the RKE2 Control Plane and set the following "kube-controller-manager-arg" argument: - use-service-account-credentials=true

Once the configuration file is updated, restart the RKE2 Server. Run the command: systemctl restart rke2-server

Identifiers

Group ID
V-254554
Group title
SRG-APP-000023-CTR-000055
Rule ID
SV-254554r1043176_rule
Check ID
C-58038r859230_chk
Fix ID
F-57987r918225_fix