benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench

benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Youngmaidainon/Agent-Level-Up. It costs 86 tokens per session (2,144 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to running kube-bench, a tool that checks whether a Kubernetes cluster follows the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark, a published set of security configuration recommendations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit the Kubernetes control plane, worker nodes, kubelet, and policies, then remediate the reported findings.
Why use it?
It shows which cluster settings fail or need review and provides guidance for correcting them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to audit the Kubernetes control plane, worker nodes, kubelet, and policies, then remediate the reported findings.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Youngmaidainon/Agent-Level-Up --skill benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Youngmaidainon/Agent-Level-Up

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/youngmaidainon/agent-level-up/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,144 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00086 $0.02144
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01072
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00429
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00214

Measured 7d ago against content hash 9bce0935d151, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench scanned grade A with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootlowPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

sudo mv kube-bench /usr/local/bin/

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -L -o kube-bench.tgz \
cyber-security/ctf/benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Benchmarking Kubernetes with kube-bench

Overview

kube-bench (by Aqua Security) is an open-source tool that checks whether a Kubernetes cluster is deployed securely by running the checks documented in the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark. It inspects the control-plane components (API server, controller manager, scheduler, etcd), the kubelet and worker-node configuration, and cluster-wide policy settings, then reports each check as PASS, FAIL, WARN, or INFO with a remediation recommendation drawn directly from the CIS guidance. Tests are configuration-driven YAML files, so kube-bench tracks new Kubernetes versions and benchmark revisions and supports managed distributions (EKS, GKE, AKS, ACK, OpenShift, RKE, k3s).

Hardening a cluster against the CIS Benchmark directly reduces the attack surface for T1610 (Deploy Container), where an adversary deploys a container to execute code or evade defenses — for example by abusing privileged containers, host namespaces, anonymous API access, or insecure kubelet settings that an unhardened cluster leaves exposed.

kube-bench can run as a standalone binary on a node, inside a container, or — most commonly — as a Kubernetes Job whose pod has the host filesystem mounted so it can read the relevant config files. Output is available as human-readable text, JSON, JUnit, or AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF) and can be pushed to a PostgreSQL database for trend tracking.

When to Use

  • When establishing a security baseline for a new Kubernetes cluster against the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark.
  • When performing periodic compliance audits of control-plane and node hardening.
  • When validating remediation after applying hardening changes (re-run to confirm checks now PASS).
  • When integrating cluster compliance scanning into CI/CD or a continuous monitoring pipeline.
  • When preparing evidence for SOC 2, PCI DSS, or internal hardening compliance.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the cluster: either SSH access to a control-plane/worker node (binary mode) or kubectl with permission to create Jobs (in-cluster mode).
  • Knowledge of the cluster's Kubernetes version (kube-bench auto-detects, or specify with --version / --benchmark).
  • Install kube-bench (Aqua Security official methods):

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 220 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 9bce0935d151

Subscribe to this mod's changes

benchmarking-kubernetes-with-kube-bench is a skill published in the GitHub repository Youngmaidainon/Agent-Level-Up (3 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 2,144 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 2 findings (asks for root, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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