Cloud Security Engineer PCCSE Paloalto Networks Study Notes

The external ID plays a crucial role when onboarding a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) account in Prisma Cloud. It serves as a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) that establishes a trust relationship between the Prisma Cloud account and the AWS account. This trust relationship is essential for allowing Prisma Cloud to securely extract data and perform security monitoring and compliance checks within the AWS environment. The use of an external ID ensures that Prisma Cloud can access the necessary information from the AWS account without compromising the security of the AWS account's credentials, adhering to the principle of least privilege and enhancing the overall security posture.

The given admission control policy is designed to evaluate pod creation requests in a Kubernetes environment, specifically targeting the creation of privileged pods, which can pose significant security risks.

• Option D: The policy will block the creation of a privileged pod is the correct answer when the effect of the policy is set to “block”. In this context, the policy's logic checks if a pod being created is set to run in privileged mode (a high-risk configuration that grants the pod extended system privileges). If such a configuration is detected, the policy triggers an action to block the pod's creation, thereby preventing the deployment of privileged pods that could undermine the security posture of the Kubernetes environment.

References:

• Kubernetes Admission Controllers Documentation: Provides a comprehensive overview of admission controllers in Kubernetes, including how they can be used to enforce policy decisions, such as preventing the creation of privileged pods.
• Best Practices for Kubernetes Security: Discusses the importance of admission control policies in maintaining the security and integrity of Kubernetes environments, with specific emphasis on the risks associated with privileged pods.

The audit trail section of an asset's detail view in Prisma Cloud typically includes a log of configuration changes and alert and vulnerability events associated with the asset. These elements are crucial for tracking the history of modifications to an asset's configuration and the security incidents that have affected it. This information is instrumental in understanding the security posture of the asset over time and in conducting thorough investigations after a security event has been detected.