Security and privacy
Credentials
Barney reads your kubeconfig and does not keep a copy of your credentials. Client certificates are loaded into a temporary keychain for the session, which is wiped when the app quits. Tokens from exec plugins are cached in memory until they expire.
TLS
Every connection is checked against the cluster's own certificate authority from the kubeconfig, and the server's host name against its certificate. Kubernetes CAs often issue certificates valid for decades, which macOS's default policy rejects; Barney validates them against the cluster's CA the way kubectl does, instead of switching checks off. A context with insecure-skip-tls-verify: true skips the check, as it does in kubectl.
Secrets
Secret values are masked everywhere until you reveal them for one object. See Secrets.
Changes to the cluster
Every change (restart, scale, delete, rollback, cordon, drain, apply) asks for confirmation first. What Barney can do is limited by your own RBAC permissions, and a refusal shows the server's message.
What goes over the network
- Your clusters, with your credentials.
- Exec plugins you configured, which talk to their cloud to get a token.
- Updates: Sparkle checks for new versions and downloads them.
Barney has no account, no analytics and no crash reporting.