Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Practice Test

When storing sensitive information with Kubernetes Secrets, Base64 encoding is commonly used to encode the data. It's important to understand the purpose of Base64 in this context. While it does provide a way to handle binary data and ensure it's in a format that can be easily transmitted via text-based protocols, it should not be considered a security mechanism.

Base64 encoding transforms the sensitive data into an ASCII string representation, which makes it easier to store within Kubernetes configurations like YAML files or when passing through APIs. However, data encoded in Base64 is not inherently secure; it can be easily decoded back to its original form. Therefore, while Base64 is utilized for representation, organizations often deploy additional security measures, such as enabling encryption at rest or employing external secret management systems to provide the actual encryption of the secret data.

The other choices, such as SSH encryption, AES encryption, and custom key management, refer to more robust security mechanisms that could be used in conjunction with Kubernetes but are not the encoding method specifically applied when creating Kubernetes Secrets.