CKS Sample Questions for Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist Exam

Get ready to ace the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam with our curated CKS sample questions. Designed around real-world Kubernetes security scenarios, these practice sets help you master core topics like cluster hardening, system protection, network policies, and runtime security. Use these as part of your prep strategy alongside trusted CKS dumps, exam questions, and hands-on labs. Whether you're studying independently or through guided learning, our comprehensive CKS exam dumps and practice tests will boost your confidence and readiness. This is the ideal resource for DevOps engineers, security analysts, and Kubernetes professionals aiming to earn the CKS credential.

CKS Sample Questions List :

1. You are tasked with setting up a new Kubernetes cluster with a strong security posture. As part of hardening the control plane, which of the following steps is most appropriate for limiting the Kubernetes API Server’s attack surface?

1. Disable insecure port (--insecure-port=0) and enforce HTTPS only

2. Use a reverse proxy to hide the API server endpoint

3. Grant system: masters group access to all users for debugging

4. Enable anonymous authentication to reduce complexity

2. Your organization wants to further restrict access to the Kubernetes API by ensuring that only authenticated users or systems can reach it. Which of the following practices provides defense-in-depth when securing access to the API server?

1. Enable anonymous authentication for monitoring systems

2. Disable anonymous authentication and use mutual TLS authentication

3. Use a proxy to log and forward all unauthenticated API requests

4. Grant system: unauthenticated group get access to all API objects

3. A security audit requires you to encrypt east-west traffic between microservices. Your team is using Istio for service mesh functionality. Which Istio feature ensures pod-to-pod encryption for all service-to-service communication?

1. Istio VirtualService configuration encrypts pod-to-pod communication by default

2. Envoy sidecars automatically encrypt all inbound traffic using TLS termination

3. PeerAuthentication with STRICT mode is applied to enforce mTLS cluster-wide

4. Istio Gateway ensures mTLS is enforced for internal and external traffic

4. Your security policy mandates that all get, list, and watch operations on Secrets be logged with full request and response bodies for forensic purposes. Which audit policy level should you configure for the Secrets resource in your audit-policy.yaml?

1. Metadata

2. RequestBody

3. RequestResponse

4. Request

5. When hardening Kubernetes nodes, which of the following principles should guide the configuration of services running on them, beyond the kubelet and container runtime?

1. Ensure all services listen on publicly accessible IP addresses for easy management.

2. Run all non-essential services as privileged containers to ensure they have the necessary access.

3. Minimize the number of services running on each node to reduce the attack surface.

4. Configure all services to run with the root user for simplicity and compatibility.

6. Which of the following actions is a critical security measure to protect kubelet endpoints and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive node information?

1. Regularly rotating the cluster's control plane certificates.

2. Implementing strong RBAC policies for users and service accounts interacting with the kube-apiserver.

3. Ensuring that kubelet TLS bootstrapping is properly configured and certificates are short-lived.

4. Enabling audit logging on the kube-apiserver to track API requests.

7.  You are responsible for ensuring that all container images used in your Kubernetes cluster are free from known vulnerabilities. As part of your CI/CD pipeline, you want to enforce a policy that prevents the deployment of containers with high-severity CVEs. Which of the following tools and configurations would be most appropriate to implement this policy?

1. Integrate a tool like Trivy or Clair with an admission controller that rejects images with high-severity CVEs.

2. Enable AppArmor profiles in the container runtime to restrict syscalls during build time.

3. Use kube-bench to scan the images for vulnerabilities and block if any are found.

4. Use Network Policies to isolate pods with vulnerable images.

8. You need to apply an AppArmor profile to a Pod in your Kubernetes cluster. The profile, named audit-only-profile, is designed to audit specific file access attempts without preventing them. How would you correctly apply this profile to a Pod named my-app?

1. Create a ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding that grants the Pod permission to use the audit-only-profile and then link it to the Pod's Service Account.

2. Define a security Context in the Pod's specification with apparmorProfile: audit-only-profile.

3. Mount the AppArmor profile file into the Pod's filesystem and then configure the application within the container to load the profile.

4. Add an annotation container.apparmor.security.beta.kubernetes.io/my-container: audit-only-profile to the Pod's metadata, assuming my-container is the name of the container within the Pod.

9. You are deploying a new microservice in a Kubernetes cluster and want to apply kernel-level restrictions to limit the system calls available to the container. Which of the following is the best approach to enforce this restriction using native Kubernetes features?

1. Add the container to the system:masters group for security context enforcement

2. Set the runAsUser field to 1000 in the Pod spec

3. Apply a seccomp profile using the securityContext.seccompProfile field

4. Enable host networking for better visibility into system calls

10. You are tasked with reviewing container images in a CI/CD pipeline for supply chain security. Which of the following practices best supports minimizing the image footprint?

1. Use a multi-stage Dockerfile to copy only required binaries into the final image.

2. Add a health check shell script to the image that includes a full bash interpreter.

3. Include a package manager in the image to enable runtime updates.

4. Install debugging tools like curl, vim, and telnet to help troubleshoot in production

11. A security audit reveals that several workloads are unintentionally exposed to the public internet in your Kubernetes cluster. What is the best strategy to remediate and prevent this in the future?

1. Delete all Ingress resources from the cluster

2. Implement Network Policies to restrict egress and ingress to only necessary endpoints

3. Disable all outbound traffic from pods by default

4. Replace all Load Balancer services with Node Port for greater control

12. A security engineer is tasked with implementing a solution to detect unauthorized access attempts to sensitive data stored within persistent volumes in a Kubernetes cluster. Which of the following monitoring and logging approaches would be most effective in achieving this goal?

1. Aggregating and analyzing network traffic logs for unusual data egress from pods accessing the volumes.

2. Analyzing Kubernetes API server audit logs for unauthorized kubectl exec commands into pods using those volumes.

3. Monitoring Kubernetes resource quotas and limits for unusual spikes.

4. Implementing file integrity monitoring (FIM) on the host file system where the persistent volumes are mounted.

13. You are using Falco to monitor runtime behavior in your Kubernetes cluster. Which of the following Falco rule violations would most strongly indicate malicious activity that behavioral analytics is designed to detect?

1. A container spawning a shell in a running pod.

2. A pod mounting a ConfigMap as a volume.

3. A user creating a Kubernetes Secret via kubectl.

4. A deployment update that changes the container image version.

14. You are deploying a secure application using Kubernetes Ingress. You’ve created a TLS secret named my-tls-secret in the production namespace, containing a valid certificate and private key for app.example.com. Which of the following Ingress definitions will correctly configure TLS termination?

1. spec:

  tls:

  - secretName: my-tls-secret

  backend:

    serviceName: my-service

    servicePort: 443

2. spec:

  tls:

  - hosts:

    - app.example.com

    secretName: my-tls-secret

3. spec:

  rules:

  - host: app.example.com

    http:

      paths:

      - backend:

          service:

            name: my-service

            port:

              number: 443

  tls: []

4. spec:

  tls:

  - hosts:

    - app.example.com

    secretName: tls-secret

15. Which of the following is the most effective method to ensure that workloads are not deployed with escalated privileges (e.g., privileged: true) in a hardened Kubernetes environment?

1. Rely on developers to avoid using privileged mode in their deployment YAMLs

2. Configure liveness probes to detect privileged pods

3. Use a PodSecurityPolicy or Pod Security Admission to restrict privileged workloads

4. Enable the Kubernetes Dashboard for all namespaces to monitor pod security

16. When creating new Service Accounts for applications that require Kubernetes API access, which of the following is a crucial step in minimizing their potential exposure?

1. Assigning the new Service Account to the system: masters group.

2. Embedding the Service Account token directly into the application's container image.

3. Granting the new Service Account cluster-admin privileges initially and then narrowing them down later.

4. Creating specific Roles or Cluster Roles with the absolute minimum necessary permissions and binding them to the new Service Account.

17. You are tasked with auditing Kubernetes API server activity to track which users are performing kubectl exec into pods. What is the most effective configuration step to ensure such actions are logged appropriately?

1. Configure the audit policy to include the Request stage and filter for pods/exec resources.

2. Use a NetworkPolicy to log all exec-related traffic.

3. Set --audit-log-path on the API server and use the Metadata audit level.

4. Enable audit logs in the kubelet configuration to capture exec commands.

18. You are setting up a Kubernetes cluster and need to ensure that all kubelet communication is encrypted. Which of the following is the most appropriate step to enforce encryption of traffic between the API server and the kubelets?

1. Enable audit logging for all API requests on the API server.

2. Configure the API server with --authorization-mode=AlwaysAllow.

3. Set the --kubelet-certificate-authority flag on the API server.

4. Enable anonymous authentication on the kubelet by setting --anonymous-auth=true.

19. You are securing a Kubernetes application that relies on a database password stored in a Secret. Which of the following practices provides the most secure method of mounting the secret into the application pod?

1. Mount the secret as a read-only volume and ensure the application reads from the file system.

2. Mount the secret as an environment variable in the container.

3. Pass the secret directly in the command line arguments of the container.

4. Store the secret as a plaintext ConfigMap and mount it as a volume.

20. You are using Cilium as your CNI plugin in a Kubernetes cluster and want to enable pod-to-pod encryption at the network layer. Which of the following is required to implement transparent encryption using IPsec or WireGuard?

1. Enable the kube-apiserver encryption provider with aescbc

2. Use ip tables rules to block all non-encrypted traffic between pods

3. Configure a Peer Authentication policy with mode STRICT

4. Use Cilium with encryption enabled by setting --encrypt-interface and choosing a backend like WireGuard

21. You are tasked with improving visibility into Kubernetes runtime security by deploying a tool that can detect anomalous behavior such as container escapes or suspicious syscalls. Which of the following tools is most appropriate for this use case?

1. Falco

2. Fluentd

3. Prometheus

4. Calico

22. You are tasked with enforcing a strict security posture for all production workloads in your Kubernetes cluster. To minimize microservice vulnerabilities, you need to ensure that: Containers cannot run as root Privilege escalation is not allowed Host networking is not used Capabilities are dropped to the minimum Which Pod Security Standard level should be applied to achieve this?

1. Default

2. Baseline

3. Privileged

4. Restricted

23. Before deploying Kubernetes platform binaries, what is the primary reason for verifying their integrity and authenticity against official sources?

1. To confirm that the binaries include all the latest features and bug fixes.

2. To mitigate the risk of deploying compromised binaries that could introduce vulnerabilities or malicious functionality into the cluster.

3. To optimize the performance of the Kubernetes components.

4. To ensure the binaries are compatible with the underlying operating system.

24. You are preparing a set of virtual machines on a private cloud to serve as nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. Which of the following steps is essential before installing Kubernetes components on each node?

1. Set ip tables to use nf_tables as the default backend

2. Disable swap memory on all nodes

3. Enable Kubernetes dashboard and Helm on all nodes

4. Set the system locale to UTF-16 for consistent encoding

25. You are reviewing container image tags in your CI/CD pipeline and want to ensure that all images are pinned to specific versions rather than floating tags. KubeLinter’s image-tag-not-latest check will flag any image using the latest tag. Which of the following image references would be flagged by that check?

1. nginx@sha256:3f15f...

2. nginx:latest

3. myapp:1.0.0

4. busybox:1.31.1

26. You are responsible for ensuring that all container images used in your Kubernetes cluster are free from known vulnerabilities. As part of your CI/CD pipeline, you want to enforce a policy that prevents the deployment of containers with high-severity CVEs. Which of the following tools and configurations would be most appropriate to implement this policy?

1. Enable AppArmor profiles in the container runtime to restrict syscalls during build time.

2. Use kube-bench to scan the images for vulnerabilities and block if any are found.

3. Integrate a tool like Trivy or Clair with an admission controller that rejects images with high-severity CVEs.

4. Use NetworkPolicies to isolate pods with vulnerable images.

27. A security audit reveals that your Kubernetes API server is still exposed via an unauthenticated interface. What is the most appropriate step to completely disable insecure, unauthenticated access to the Kubernetes API?

1. Configure RBAC to allow anonymous access only to specific endpoints

2. Set --secure-port=0 to disable secure access and reduce complexity

3. Set --insecure-bind-address=127.0.0.1

4. Set --insecure-port=0 in the API server configuration

28. You want to establish a baseline for container behavior and receive alerts when containers deviate from that baseline (e.g., spawning a shell unexpectedly or modifying system files). Which of the following approaches is most aligned with behavioral analytics for Kubernetes runtime security?

1. Restrict ingress traffic using Kubernetes network policies

2. Apply strict PodSecurity admission policies to all namespaces

3. Deploy a runtime security tool that detects behavioral anomalies based on syscall events

4. Use Fluentd to stream logs to a centralized log server

29. You have downloaded the kubelet binary for use in a custom Kubernetes cluster deployment. To ensure the binary hasn't been tampered with, what is the most appropriate method to verify its integrity and authenticity before deployment?

1. Use sha256sum to compute the checksum and compare it against the published checksum from the Kubernetes release page.

2. Run the binary with --version to verify the version matches your requirements.

3. Compare the file size of the downloaded binary with the expected size listed on the website.

4. Run chmod +x kubelet and inspect the binary with strings to look for suspicious content.

30. You are building a Go-based microservice to be deployed on Kubernetes. To achieve the smallest possible base image footprint while ensuring the application can run, which of the following base image categories would generally be the most suitable starting point?

1. A full Linux distribution image (e.g., Ubuntu, CentOS) with a package manager.

2. A "scratch" image with only the statically compiled Go binary copied into it.

3. A minimal distribution image focused on containers (e.g., Alpine Linux) with necessary libraries.

4. A language-specific base image (e.g., golang:<version>) with the Go toolchain.

31. A developer team requests access to logs of pods in their namespace. As a security engineer, how do you apply the least-privilege model while fulfilling their request?

1. Create a custom Role with get, list, and watch for pods/log in the target namespace

2. Assign a ClusterRole that grants access to pods/exec and pods/log globally

3. Bind the edit Role to each developer in the namespace

4. Grant view ClusterRole to the entire development group using ClusterRoleBinding

32. Your team is deploying microservices to a Kubernetes cluster. To minimize microservice vulnerabilities, which of the following practices should be implemented during the build and deployment phases?

1. Use the latest tag for container images to always get the most recent features and patches

2. Include full OS utilities in container images for easier debugging

3. Disable container image signature verification to reduce overhead

4. Scan container images for known vulnerabilities using tools like Trivy or Clair before deployment

33. Which of the following configurations is most effective for minimizing external network access to Kubernetes components such as the API server and etcd?

1. Enable access to etcd from all pods to ensure configuration flexibility

2. Expose the Kubernetes API server via a load balancer with unrestricted internet access

3. Enable public IPs for all Kubernetes nodes for faster troubleshooting

4. Use private IP addresses and a bastion host to access the cluster securely

34. You want to enforce stronger isolation for a high-risk, untrusted microservice running in a shared cluster. Which of the following Kubernetes-native or compatible features provides the strongest runtime sandboxing for this container?

1. Dedicated node pool without network policies

2. Use a privileged security context with unrestricted capabilities

3. Enable gVisor or another OCI-compliant sandbox runtime for the pod

4. Read-only host filesystem mount

35. You are tasked with hardening a Kubernetes cluster. Which of the following actions most effectively reduces the attack surface of the control plane components?

1. Disable admission controllers to improve performance

2. Ensure control plane components run with non-root users and minimal privileges

3. Run control plane components as static Pods with unrestricted host access

4. Enable basic authentication to simplify access for administrators

36. Your organization's security team has flagged your Kubernetes cluster as running a version with known vulnerabilities. As a Kubernetes administrator, which of the following is the best practice for performing a version upgrade with minimal disruption?

1. Ignore the upgrade if you have pod security policies and RBAC configured

2. Perform an in-place upgrade of all control plane and node components simultaneously

3. Upgrade all worker nodes first to ensure compatibility before upgrading the control plane

4. Use the official documentation and upgrade the control plane components first in a rolling fashion

37. You are asked to validate a newly built container image to ensure it doesn’t run as root and that its security posture is hardened before it’s deployed. Which of the following static analysis tools can be used to analyze the image's security configuration, including Linux capabilities and root usage?

1. Falco

2. kube-sec

3. kube-linter

4. kube-hunter

38. You are configuring a production Kubernetes cluster and want to ensure that etcd is securely configured. Which of the following is the best practice to protect etcd communication and data?

1. Disable mutual TLS authentication to simplify client configuration.

2. Use --insecure-transport=true to allow client compatibility.

3. Encrypt etcd data at rest using the API server's encryption provider.

4. Configure etcd to listen on both HTTP and HTTPS ports.

39. A platform engineer is evaluating different static analysis tools for their Kubernetes environment and is considering using KubeLinter. Which of the following is a key capability offered by KubeLinter that distinguishes it from a more basic YAML linter?

1. It validates Kubernetes YAML files against the official Kubernetes API schema.

2. It can automatically scale Kubernetes deployments based on predefined metrics

3. It detects and reports on potential security and operational issues by checking for a wide range of Kubernetes-specific best practices.

4. It enforces custom security policies defined using Open Policy Agent (OPA).

40. You are preparing to deploy a custom Kubernetes control plane and want to ensure the authenticity of the kube-apiserver binary you downloaded from GitHub. What is the best practice to confirm both integrity and origin of the binary?

1. Confirm that the binary runs properly in a staging environment.

2. Trust the HTTPS connection used during download since it's secure by default.

3. Check the modification time of the binary matches the release timestamp.

4. Verify the SHA-256 checksum against the one provided on GitHub releases and validate the GPG signature using the Kubernetes release manager’s public key.

41. You are tasked with setting up runtime security for a Kubernetes cluster running critical workloads. The goal is to detect and prevent suspicious activity inside running containers without modifying application code. Which of the following tools or approaches is most appropriate for this requirement?

1. Deploy Falco to monitor system calls and trigger alerts based on suspicious behavior

2. Use ConfigMaps to inject secrets securely at runtime

3. Use Fluentd to export application logs to an external storage system

4. Enable Prometheus metrics scraping for CPU and memory usage

42. A security team wants to ensure that all actions taken within the Kubernetes API are logged and auditable. They also want to filter logs to only capture create, update, and delete operations on Secrets and ConfigMaps. What is the most appropriate solution?

1. Enable Falco to monitor API calls

2. Configure Kubernetes audit policy with appropriate rules

3. Create a NetworkPolicy to deny traffic to the API server

4. Enable etcd encryption

43. To effectively investigate and identify bad actors in a Kubernetes environment, which of the following data sources would provide the most comprehensive and correlated view of events across different layers of the cluster?

1. Kubernetes API server audit logs alone, as they record all interactions with the control plane.

2. Container runtime logs (e.g., Docker or containerd logs) from individual Nodes, as they detail container-level activity.

3. A centralized logging and monitoring solution that aggregates Kubernetes API server logs, Node-level system logs, container runtime logs, and application logs, correlated with network activity.

4. Network traffic logs (e.g., VPC flow logs or service mesh telemetry) combined with application-level logs.

44. Your security team noticed an increase in API requests from a particular user account that began shortly after working hours. The account accessed multiple resources it usually does not interact with. What phase of attack does this most likely indicate in the context of the MITRE ATT&CK framework for Kubernetes?

1. Execution

2. Exfiltration

3. Initial Access

4. Lateral Movement

45. In a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster, you need to ensure strong isolation between microservices belonging to different tenants. Which of the following Kubernetes features provides the most fundamental level of resource and namespace isolation for achieving this?

1. Pod Security Standards (PSS)

2. Namespaces

3. Network Policies

4. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

46. Which of the following Kubernetes security hardening practices is most directly aimed at limiting the potential blast radius of a compromised container within a pod?

1. Utilizing audit logging on the kube-apiserver.

2. Implementing Network Policies to restrict inter-pod communication.

3. Enabling the AlwaysPullImages admission controller.

4. Applying Pod Security Admission (PSA) to enforce security contexts.

47. You are reviewing security configurations for a Kubernetes cluster to reduce the attack surface of the Kubernetes API server. Which of the following options best helps restrict unauthenticated access to the Kubernetes API?

1. Disable anonymous authentication and configure API server with --authorization-mode=RBAC,Node

2. Enable legacy ABAC authorization along with RBAC for backward compatibility

3. Allow anonymous authentication and enable RBAC for fine-grained control

4. Set --insecure-port=8080 to allow internal tools easier access to the API

48. Which of the following Kubernetes components, when assessed against the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark, has specific recommendations primarily focused on restricting file system permissions and ownership to prevent unauthorized access and modification?

1. kubelet

2. etcd

3. kube-proxy

4. kube-apiserver

49. You are reviewing the Kubernetes manifest of a critical application that pulls its container image from a public registry. To enhance supply chain security, which of the following measures would best ensure that only trusted images are used in the cluster?

1. Mount the container filesystem as read-only

2. Configure an image policy webhook to validate image signatures before allowing deployment

3. Enable Kubernetes audit logs to monitor image pulls

4. Use latest tag in image definition to always get the most recent version

FAQs

1. What is the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) certification?

CKS is a performance-based certification from CNCF that validates skills in securing container-based applications and Kubernetes platforms.

2. Is the CKS exam hard to pass?

Yes, it is considered challenging due to its hands-on, scenario-based format and time constraints. Strong practical knowledge is essential.

3. How do I prepare for the CKS certification?

Use the official CNCF curriculum and hands-on labs. CertiMaan also provides practice tests and training aligned with the latest CKS blueprint.

4. What are the prerequisites for taking the CKS exam?

You must have an active CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) certification before attempting the CKS exam.

5. What is the difference between CKA and CKS?

CKA focuses on general Kubernetes administration, while CKS emphasizes securing Kubernetes clusters and workloads.

6. How much does the CKS certification cost?

The CKS exam costs $395 USD, which includes one exam attempt and a free retake if necessary.

7. How long is the CKS exam and what is the format?

The exam lasts 2 hours and consists of performance-based tasks executed in a live Kubernetes environment.

8. What topics are covered in the CKS exam?

Major domains include Cluster Setup, System Hardening, Microservices Security, Supply Chain Security, and Monitoring & Logging.

9. Is hands-on Kubernetes experience required for CKS?

Yes, practical experience is crucial, as the exam is lab-based with real-time problem-solving tasks.

10. How many questions are in the CKS exam?

There are typically 15–20 tasks to complete, each with a weighted score, within the 2-hour time limit.

11. Can I take the CKS exam online from home?

Yes, the exam is proctored online and can be taken remotely using a secure browser setup.

12. What is the passing score for the CKS exam?

You must score at least 66% to pass the CKS certification exam.

13. How long is the CKS certification valid?

CKS certification is valid for 3 years from the date you pass the exam.

14. What are the best resources to study for CKS?

The CNCF curriculum and CertiMaan’s hands-on CKS practice labs, dumps, and updated materials are highly recommended.

15. Where can I find real CKS practice tests or dumps?

CertiMaan provides trusted, updated CKS dumps and simulation-based mock exams that closely follow the exam format.

16. Is CKS worth it for DevSecOps or Kubernetes professionals?

Absolutely. It proves your ability to secure Kubernetes environments, making it valuable for security-focused DevOps careers.

17. What jobs can I get with a CKS certification?

Jobs include Kubernetes Security Engineer, Cloud Security Architect, DevSecOps Engineer, and Platform Engineer.

18. What is the average salary for CKS certified professionals?

Salaries vary by region, but professionals often earn between $110,000–$160,000 USD annually, depending on role and experience.

19. Do I need to complete CKA before attempting CKS?

Yes. Having an active CKA certification is mandatory to register for the CKS exam.

20. Does CertiMaan offer updated dumps and training for CKS?

Yes, CertiMaan provides updated dumps, real exam scenarios, and curated training material to help you pass the CKS exam confidently.