coreweave-security-basics

CoreWeave Security Basics

Overview

CoreWeave provides bare-metal GPU cloud on Kubernetes. Security concerns center on compute credential management (kubeconfig, deploy tokens), network isolation between inference workloads, secrets for model registry access (HuggingFace, container registries), and protecting sensitive training data on persistent volumes. A compromised namespace can expose GPU resources, model weights, and customer inference data.

API Key Management

import { KubeConfig, CoreV1Api } from "@kubernetes/client-node";

function createCoreWeaveClient(): CoreV1Api {
  const apiKey = process.env.COREWEAVE_API_KEY;
  if (!apiKey) {
    throw new Error("Missing COREWEAVE_API_KEY — set via secrets manager");
  }
  const kc = new KubeConfig();
  kc.loadFromDefault();
  const api = kc.makeApiClient(CoreV1Api);
  // Never log kubeconfig or API key contents
  console.log("CoreWeave client initialized for namespace:", process.env.CW_NAMESPACE);
  return api;
}

Webhook Signature Verification

import crypto from "crypto";
import { Request, Response, NextFunction } from "express";

function verifyCoreWeaveWebhook(req: Request, res: Response, next: NextFunction): void {
  const signature = req.headers["x-coreweave-signature"] as string;
  const secret = process.env.COREWEAVE_WEBHOOK_SECRET!;
  const expected = crypto.createHmac("sha256", secret).update(req.body).digest("hex");
  if (!signature || !crypto.timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(signature), Buffer.from(expected))) {
    res.status(401).send("Invalid signature");
    return;
  }
  next();
}

Input Validation

import { z } from "zod";

const WorkloadRequestSchema = z.object({
  namespace: z.string().regex(/^[a-z0-9-]+$/).max(63),
  gpu_type: z.enum(["A100_80GB", "A100_40GB", "H100_80GB", "RTX_A6000"]),
  gpu_count: z.number().int().min(1).max(8),
  image: z.string().regex(/^[a-z0-9.\-/]+:[a-z0-9.\-]+$/),
  model_id: z.string().min(1).max(200),
});

function validateWorkloadRequest(data: unknown) {
  return WorkloadRequestSchema.parse(data);
}

Data Protection

const CW_SENSITIVE_FIELDS = ["kubeconfig", "hf_token", "registry_password", "api_key", "model_weights_url"];

function redactCoreWeaveLog(record: Record<string, unknown>): Record<string, unknown> {
  const redacted = { ...record };
  for (const field of CW_SENSITIVE_FIELDS) {
    if (field in redacted) redacted[field] = "[REDACTED]";
  }
  return redacted;
}

Security Checklist

• Kubeconfig stored in secrets manager, never in repos
• Kubernetes Secrets used for model tokens (not env vars in YAML)
• Network policies restrict inference endpoint access
• RBAC limits namespace access per team
• Container images scanned for CVEs before deployment
• PVCs encrypted at rest for training data
• GPU workload namespaces isolated with NetworkPolicy
• Deploy tokens scoped per-namespace, not cluster-wide

Error Handling

Vulnerability	Risk	Mitigation
Leaked kubeconfig	Full cluster access, GPU resource theft	Secrets manager + RBAC scoping
Open inference endpoints	Unauthorized model access	NetworkPolicy ingress rules
Unscanned container images	CVE exploitation in GPU pods	CI image scanning before deploy
Overly broad RBAC	Cross-namespace data leakage	Per-team namespace RBAC bindings
Unencrypted PVCs	Training data exposure	Encrypted storage classes

Resources

• CoreWeave CKS Security
• OWASP API Security Top 10

Next Steps

See coreweave-prod-checklist.