GKE Creation of a RoleBinding Referencing a ServiceAccount
Detects creation of a GKE RoleBinding or ClusterRoleBinding that grants permissions to a ServiceAccount, which may indicate privilege delegation or RBAC misconfiguration leading to elevated access.
Detection logic
Its licence does not clear it for publishing here
Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.
Detection requirements
- Platform
- ContainersESXiIaaSIdentity ProviderLinuxmacOSNetwork DevicesOffice SuiteSaaSWindows
The rule states no platform. This is derived from the ATT&CK technique it maps to.
- Log source category
- event_index
Known benign triggers
- GitOps, namespace onboarding, and workload deployment commonly create RoleBindings for service accounts. Default bootstrap bindings from `system:apiserver` and GKE node bootstrap from `gcp:kube-bootstrap` are excluded.
MITRE ATT&CK mappings
0 exclusive techniques.This is coverage no other published rule has; it is not this rule's total technique count.
References
| Reference | Cited by |
|---|---|
| heilancoos.github.io/research/2025/12/16/kubernetes.html#overly-permissive-role-based-access-control | 21 |
| kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/rbac/ | 9from 2 sources |
From the source
- At source
- Open at source
- Upstream identifier
- 1e58e0a0-7674-4aa9-9409-f72f100a8b5e
- Tagged by the source as
- Data Source: GCPData Source: Google Cloud PlatformDomain: CloudDomain: ContainersDomain: KubernetesNoise: LowPerformance: FastPlatform: GCPPlatform: KubernetesResources: Investigation GuideRule Type: Custom Query (KQL)Tactic: PersistenceTactic: Privilege EscalationUse Case: Threat Detection
Licence
- Published under
- Elastic License 2.0Read the licence
- Attribution
- Required
Authorship
- Written by
- Published
- Sep 20, 2026
- Version
- 3