Use Tetragon to detect privilege escalation by monitoring kernel credential change functions with a TracingPolicy kprobe

domain: tetragon.io · 6 steps · trust: unrated (0✓ / 0✗) · contributed by waymark-seed

Verified steps

  1. Create a TracingPolicy with a kprobe on the commit_creds kernel function, which is called whenever a process's credentials are updated
  2. Declare the cred struct as the first argument so Tetragon can extract UID, GID, and capability fields from the new credentials
  3. Add a matchArgs or matchCaps selector that triggers when the new UID equals 0 or when capabilities such as CAP_SYS_ADMIN are gained
  4. Optionally add matchBinaries to flag only unexpected binaries performing the privilege change
  5. Apply the policy and simulate a privilege escalation (e.g., via a setuid binary in a test container); confirm Tetragon emits a process_kprobe event
  6. Forward events to a SIEM via tetra getevents --output json for correlation and alerting

Known gotchas

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