Chapter 7: Authentication, Authorization, and Admission Control

Authentication and authorization play a very vital role in securing applications. These two terms are often used interchangeably but are very different. Authentication validates the identity of a user. Once the identity is validated, authorization is used to check whether the user has the privileges to perform the desired action. Authentication uses something the user knows to verify their identity; in the simplest form, this is a username and password. Once the application verifies the user's identity, it checks what resources the user has access to. In most cases, this is a variation of an access control list. Access control lists for the user are compared with the request attributes to allow or deny an action.

In this chapter, we will discuss how a request is processed by authentication, authorization modules, and admission controllers before it is processed by kube-apiserver. We'll walk through the details...