Developing secure Helm charts

While provenance and integrity play a major role in the security of Helm, they are not the only concerns you need to consider. Chart developers should ensure that, during the development process, they are adhering to best practices regarding security to prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced when a user installs the chart in a Kubernetes cluster. In this section, we will discuss many of the primary concerns around security as it relates to Helm chart development and what you, as a developer, can do to write Helm charts with security as a priority.

We will begin by first discussing the security around any container images that your Helm chart may use.

Using secure images

Since the goal of Helm (and Kubernetes) is to deploy container images, the image itself is a major security concern. To start, chart developers should be aware of the differences between image tags and image digests.

A tag is a human-readable reference to a given image...