In a significant development for cloud-native security, a subproject of Cilium, Tetragon, has been created to bring real-time security observability and runtime enforcement to containers and Kubernetes environments. This innovative tool taps into eBPF hooks in the Linux kernel, providing unparalleled context and policy enforcement primitives for runtime security.

The need for such a solution arises from the increasingly distributed nature of modern enterprise infrastructure, with the average application having over 150 dependencies, according to Sonatype. This complexity makes it challenging to troubleshoot security threats, which are often of the software supply chain variety. Traditional security approaches are no longer effective in containerized environments, where services are running, and IP addresses are constantly being reassigned.

Kubernetes, which has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, has introduced new security challenges. Its labels and pods have broken traditional IP-centric security approaches, making it difficult to determine service locations, ingress, and egress points. The abstraction layers in distributed systems create blind spots for security professionals, making it essential to gather context at a lower level, specifically from the Linux kernel.

Tetragon, created by Isovalent, the developers of Cilium, is a free, open-source tool that leverages Cilium's networking, security, and observability capabilities, which rely on eBPF's hooks into the Linux kernel. As a Kubernetes-aware security observability and runtime enforcement tool, Tetragon provides the missing context and policy enforcement primitives for runtime security in containerized environments.

Tetragon's capabilities include intelligent in-kernel filtering and aggregation, enabling real-time threat detection and policy enforcement with minimal impact on system performance. It can correlate process-level activities with network flows, showing which specific processes within containers are establishing connections or attempting suspicious network activities. This network awareness extends across clusters and environments, providing deep context about the originating processes and binaries.

Tetragon excels in use cases requiring deep security observability, such as detecting unauthorized process executions, monitoring sensitive file access, tracking privilege escalations, and identifying suspicious network patterns. From an enforcement perspective, Tetragon enables real-time policy controls over system calls, file operations, network communications, and process behaviors, all defined through Kubernetes-native policies.

The significance of Tetragon lies in its ability to provide a new era of network observability and security. By operating at the kernel level, Tetragon can look at file access, specific namespaces or containers, and tie them with identity metadata. It can also examine networking events more closely. With the hooks of eBPF in the kernel and extension into the network, Tetragon promises richer remediation workflows than are currently possible.

In the context of modern security and networking, Tetragon represents a crucial development. As personas such as network administrators, virtual machine administrators, Kubernetes platform engineers, and cloud engineers converge into "platform engineering" teams, the need for powerful runtime security that can be generalized across the enterprise stack becomes increasingly important. With Tetragon, the rich contextualization of security events and the ability to enforce against them across the kernel, network layer, and user space will become a critical skill for platform engineers and developers alike.