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CKS Curriculum and Tooling Updates

Itai Ganot
Site Creator

The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam is frequently updated to stay aligned with the Kubernetes ecosystem and its evolving security landscape. This post tracks official updates to the CKS curriculum and tooling environment provided by the CNCF.

The goal is to help CKS candidates stay on top of the exam’s scope and prepare accordingly.

Update Log​

2024-07-01 — CKS Updated to Kubernetes v1.28​

  • New Kubernetes version: v1.28
  • Tools like kubectl, kube-bench, and trivy updated to reflect this version.
  • Removal of deprecated APIs.
  • Minor updates to audit logging objectives.

2023-06-30 — Curriculum Realignment​

  • Topics under “Supply Chain Security” restructured for clarity.
  • Emphasis added on detecting insecure base images and signed artifacts.
  • Link time attacks and tampering highlighted as new subtopics.

2022-09-01 — CKS Upgraded to Kubernetes v1.25​

  • Updated exam clusters to Kubernetes v1.25
  • Introduced seccomp profiles under the “Pod Security” domain
  • Deprecated PodSecurityPolicies officially removed from exam scope

2021-10-15 — CKS Environment Tooling Updated​

  • Switched to using crictl as the primary container runtime interface tool
  • Default editor changed from vi to nano (optionally configurable)
  • Introduction of kube-bench, trivy, and kyverno as allowed tools

2021-06-01 — Initial CKS Curriculum Launch​

  • Focused on 6 domains:
    • Cluster Setup
    • System Hardening
    • Minimize Microservice Vulnerabilities
    • Supply Chain Security
    • Monitoring, Logging, and Runtime Security
    • Incident Response

Stay Updated​

To ensure you're always prepared:

This post will be regularly updated with future changes to the CKS curriculum. Bookmark this page or subscribe to our updates.