Why does the defaultbase64 encodingthat Kubernetes applies to the contents of Secret resources provide inadequate...

Kubernetes stores Secret data asbase64-encoded stringsin etcd by default.

Base64 is not encryption— it is a simple encoding scheme that merelyobfuscatesdata for transport and storage. Anyone with read access to etcd or the Secret manifest can easily decode the value back to plaintext.

For actual protection, Kubernetes supportsencryption at rest(via encryption providers) and external Secret management (Vault, KMS, etc.).