Question

A developer creates a Secret manifest and notices that when they run 'kubectl get secret db-secret -o yaml', the password field shows a string of seemingly random characters rather than the plaintext value they set. A teammate claims this means the credentials are securely encrypted at rest. What is the most accurate assessment of this situation?

Accepted Answer

The value is only base64-encoded, which is trivially reversible and does not provide encryption on its own.

Answer

The value is encrypted using the cluster's TLS certificate and cannot be decoded without the private key.

Answer

Kubernetes automatically hashes Secret values with a one-way function, so the original password cannot be recovered.

Answer

The value is signed by the API server to prevent tampering but remains readable as plaintext.