Pahlevan

Your workload writes its own security policy. The kernel enforces it.

The idea

A container runs one program, opens the same files, dials the same few destinations and uses about sixty of the kernel's four hundred syscalls. Pahlevan watches it do that once, then refuses everything else in the kernel with EPERM. Nobody writes a rule, and an attacker inherits the baseline instead of root.

The console

Run pahlevan to see policies, workloads, live events and ATT&CK coverage in one place. It only reads, so it cannot turn enforcement off.

The trade

A baseline narrow enough to stop an attacker is narrow enough to stop you: kubectl exec into a pod and run curl, and it is denied. Start in Monitoring, which reports without denying, and use self-healing and policy exceptions to widen the set deliberately.

Architecture

A per-node agent enforces in the kernel. A leader-elected operator drives the policy lifecycle with no host access; if it is down, enforcement keeps working.

Quick start

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/obsernetics/pahlevan/releases/latest/download/install.yaml

apiVersion: policy.pahlevan.io/v1beta1
kind: PahlevanPolicy
metadata: {name: nginx}
spec:
  selector: {matchLabels: {app: nginx}}
  learningConfig: {duration: 5m, autoTransition: true}
  enforcementConfig: {mode: Monitoring}   # Blocking denies in-kernel

pahlevan policy explain -f policy.yaml shows what a policy will enforce, with no cluster. More in docs/quick-start.md.

Requirements

Kubernetes	1.24+
Linux	5.8+ to observe
Enforcement	lsm=bpf on the kernel command line

Without the BPF LSM, Pahlevan observes but cannot refuse. See docs/system-requirements.md.

Status

One maintainer, no public production adopters yet. A workload already compromised when learning starts has that behaviour baselined too. ROADMAP.md says what exists and what does not.

Contributing

Run make test lint. eBPF changes must pass make vm-test, which loads the programs in a VM, never on your machine. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Apache 2.0.