Closing the Loop: From Network Policy Intent to Verified Reality
Red Hat, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
Part three of a zero trust series on the gap between declaring Kubernetes NetworkPolicies and verifying they work.
The third part of Red Hat's zero trust series examines Kubernetes NetworkPolicies as security primitives and the gap between declaring intent and verifying what is actually enforced.
A NetworkPolicy that references a label nothing carries, or that is silently ignored because no CNI plugin implements it, looks identical in the manifest to one that works.
The post covers verification approaches within OpenShift environments. This is a common and consequential failure mode, since teams frequently believe segmentation exists where it does not.