Kubetier
  1. Create a pod using hostNetwork, hostPID, hostIPC or hostPath as available

  2. hostNetwork reaches cloud metadata and the API server from the node network namespace.

    hostPID reads host process env vars

  3. hostPath to / reads other pods' SA tokens under /var/lib/kubelet and the cluster CA private key if scheduled on a control plane node

Note:

On a control plane node, hostPath to / exposes the cluster CA private key for full cluster compromise.

On worker nodes this is node-level only (T1).

K8s docs ↗