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Security Certifications

New to containers or looking to expand your knowledge? Our RGS team shares detailed product insights and relevant customer experiences in our resource library to support you on your Kubernetes journey.

CMMC Level 2 Certified

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) is among the estimated first 1% of U.S. government contractors to earn Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Level 2 through a certified third-party assessment. This certification confirms that RGS meets the Department of Defense’s security standards for protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) within contractor systems. 

Achieving this certification took more than 150 documented policies, procedures, and controls, all developed and implemented by a small internal team. RGS completed the process with no open action items (POA&Ms), a result few organizations achieve. This places us in a select group of early certified contractors and positions us to assist federal partners seeking their own CMMC assessments. 

More information: CMMC Accreditation Body

RGS CMMC SPRS: L200000463
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DISA STIG Guides

Rancher Government Solutions is currently in the process of developing and maintaining Rancher and RKE2 STIGs with DISA. We allow our customers to access these in-flight for further reference and encourage any feedback you may have.

Rancher STIG

RKE2 STIG

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FIPS 140-2 Certified

The Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS, is a U.S. Government security standard used to approve cryptographic modules. Rancher Government Solutions delivers secure Kubernetes to federal programs with certified FIPS-140-2 cryptographic libraries for RKE2.


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The Center for Internet Security (CIS – https://www.cisecurity.org/benchmark/kubernetes/) is an accepted third-party and nonprofit organization whose mission is to “identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense and build and lead communities to enable an environment of trust in cyberspace” (https://www.cisecurity.org/about-us/).

RGS takes these benchmarks and either builds the controls directly into RKE2 or allows for the configuration to be applied extremely easily via automated scripts and input parameters. In addition to applying the benchmarks, we also build tools that can periodically scan security configurations to enforce this compliance.

Enumerating the controls contained in these documents can also provide a large body of evidence needed for security approvals.

Consult the following resources for information about hardening your cluster according to the CIS benchmarks:



USAF Iron Bank

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) works closely with SUSE Labs to ensure images are secure and up to government standards wherever possible. RGS also develops and maintains pipelines with Platform One’s Iron Bank to provide hardened versions of images available to all teams with access to Iron Bank.

RKE2 Source Code @ Repo1

Iron Bank images require the following functions:

  • CVE vulnerability feedback
    • RGS and SUSE Labs both independently scan images and work together to mitigate findings 
    • SUSE Labs has automated processes for scanning images before they are pushed and creating mitigation tasks internally for engineers to fix findings
  • Image rebuilds
    • In addition to ensuring images in docker.io/rancher are secure, RGS works with the Platform One team to rebuild images for pushing into the Iron Bank repositories
    • SUSE Labs-backed image rebuild process ensuring SUSE Labs supported end results
    • Re-scanned with Iron Bank scanners : Twistlock, Trivy, Anchore CVE + Compliance
    • Uses Iron Bank certified base images for more security.