Limiting Identity-Relevant Labels

We recommend that operators with larger environments limit the set of identity-relevant labels to avoid frequent creation of new security identities. Many Kubernetes labels are not useful for policy enforcement or visibility. A few good examples of such labels include timestamps or hashes. These labels, when included in evaluation, cause Cilium to generate a unique identity for each pod instead of a single identity for all of the pods that comprise a service or application.

By default, Cilium considers all labels to be relevant for identities, with the following exceptions:

The above label examples are all exclusive labels, that is to say they define which label keys should be ignored. These are identified by the presence of the ! character.

Label configurations that do not contain the ! character are inclusive labels. Once at least one inclusive label is added, only labels that match the inclusive label configuration may be considered relevant for identities. Additionally, when at least one inclusive label is configured, the following inclusive labels are automatically added to the configuration:

Configuring Identity-Relevant Labels

To limit the labels used for evaluating Cilium identities, edit the Cilium ConfigMap object using kubectl edit cm -n kube-system cilium-config and insert a line to define the labels to include or exclude.

apiVersion: v1
data:
...
  kube-proxy-replacement: partial
  labels:  "k8s:io.kubernetes.pod.namespace k8s:k8s-app k8s:app k8s:name"
  masquerade: "true"
  monitor-aggregation: medium
...

Upon defining a custom list of labels in the ConfigMap, Cilium add the provided list of labels to the default list of labels. After saving the ConfigMap, restart the Cilium Agents to pickup the new labels setting.

kubectl delete pods -n kube-system -l k8s-app=cilium

Existing identities will not change as a result of this new configuration. To apply the new label setting to existing identities, restart the associated pods. Upon restart, new identities will be created. The old identities will be garbage collected by the Cilium Operator once they are no longer used by any Cilium endpoints.

When specifying multiple labels to evaluate, provide the list of labels as a space-separated string.

Including Labels

Labels can be defined as a list of labels to include. Only the labels specified and the default inclusive labels will be used to evaluate Cilium identities:

labels: "k8s:io.kubernetes.pod.namespace k8s:k8s-app k8s:app k8s:name"

The above configuration would only include the following label keys when evaluating Cilium identities:

• k8s:k8s-app
• k8s:app
• k8s:name
• reserved:.*
• io.kubernetes.pod.namespace
• io.cilium.k8s.namespace.labels
• app.kubernetes.io

Note that k8s:io.kubernetes.pod.namespace is already included in default label io.kubernetes.pod.namespace.

Labels with the same prefix as defined in the configuration will also be considered. This lists some examples of label keys that would also be evaluated for Cilium identities:

• k8s-app-team
• app-production
• name-defined

When a single inclusive label is added to the filter, all labels not defined in the default list will be excluded. For example, pods running with the security labels team=team-1, env=prod will have the label env=prod ignored as soon Cilium is started with the filter k8s:team.

Excluding Labels

Labels can also be specified as a list of exclusions. Exclude a label by placing an exclamation mark after colon separating the prefix and label. When defined as a list of exclusions, Cilium will include the set of default labels, but will exclude any matches in the provided list when evaluating Cilium identities:

labels: "k8s:!controller-uid k8s:!job-name"

The provided example would cause Cilium to exclude any of the following label matches:

• k8s:controller-uid
• k8s:job-name