Default ingress and egress rules

The ingress and egress rules are necessary to build a secure setup where every component acts with the least amount of privilege necessary. These rules protect your cluster by strictly blocking unnecessary traffic and only allowing the outbound connections needed to fetch secrets. They also permit the specific inbound connections required to validate webhooks and observe system performance.

The following table summarizes the specific ports and protocols used by each component.

Component Ingress ports Egress ports Description

external-secrets

8080

6443

Allows retrieving metrics and interacting with the API server

external-secrets-webhook

8080/10250

6443

Allows retrieving metrics, handling webhook requests, and interacting with the API server

external-secrets-cert-controller

8080

6443

Allows retrieving metrics and interacting with the API server

external-secrets-bitwarden-server

9998

6443

Handles Bitwarden server connections and interacts with the API server

external-secrets-allow-dns

5353

Enables DNS lookups to find external secret providers.