Access to every resource should be authenticated and authorized based on dynamic policy. Istio authorization doesnt need to be explicitly enabled. Optional. Similarly to telemetry and traffic management, the real deal happens in the data plane. Access to resources should be bounded in space. Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community. /package.service/method. Standalone Operator Install [Experimental], Simplified Multicluster Install [Experimental], Upgrade Istio using istioctl [Experimental], Plugging in External CA Key and Certificate, Configure Citadel Service Account Secret Generation, Authorization Policy Trust Domain Migration, Virtual Machines in Single-Network Meshes, Learn Microservices using Kubernetes and Istio, Install Istio for Google Cloud Endpoints Services, Extending Self-Signed Certificate Lifetime, Generate Istio Metrics Without Mixer [Alpha], Understand your Mesh with Istioctl Describe, Diagnose your Configuration with Istioctl Analyze, RBAC Constraints and Properties (deprecated), ConflictingMeshGatewayVirtualServiceHosts, VirtualServiceDestinationPortSelectorRequired. Zero trust security is emerging as a preferred approach for enterprises to secure both their traditional and modern, cloud-native applications. Fine-grained policy. A list of paths, which matches to the request.url_path attribute. app: httpbin in namespace bar. https://istio.io/v1.7/docs/concepts/security/#dependency-on-mutual-tls, https://preliminary.istio.io/latest/docs/ops/configuration/traffic-management/tls-configuration/#auto-mtls. 1.2.3.0/24) are supported. Shows how to integrate and delegate access control to an external authorization system. Source specifies the source identities of a request. For an in-depth guide to NISTs security recommendations and how Tetrate can help you implement the standard, check out Tetrates Guide to Federal Security Requirements for Microservices. For gRPC service, this should be the fully-qualified name in the form of Source specifies the source of a request. AuthorizationPolicy enables access control on workloads. Bounding in space allows for high granularity of policy enforcement. This kind of access control is enforced at the application layer by the Envoy sidecar proxies. RED Alerts: a practical guide for alerting in production systems, What's new in Istio 1.8, a quick walkthrough, "cluster.local/ns/backyards-demo/sa/frontpage", "cluster.local/ns/backyards-demo/sa/catalog", "cluster.local/ns/backyards-demo/sa/bookings", Backyards (now Cisco Service Mesh Manager), free tier version of Cisco Service Mesh Manager, these rules are enforced for the pods that match the label selector, it denies every other request to the movies workload, the same goal could have been achieved with two different, mutual TLS is required to securely pass information between Envoy proxies, and its needed for some of the fields, like, plain TCP traffic can also be authorized by Istio, but in that case the, most fields support exact, prefix, suffix and presence value matching: prefix and suffix is when the value starts or ends with a. Istio claims that it helps to connect, secure, control and observe services. The scope of label search is restricted to Bounding in time with dynamic policy enforcement on short-lived sessions ensures authorization is based on up-to-date policy. Istio claims that it helps to connect, secure, control and observe services. an optional selector. Optional. Secure, authentic communication. In an increasingly complex networking environment, maintaining a robust perimeter is increasingly difficult. Workload selector decides where to apply the authorization policy. A list of hosts, which matches to the request.host attribute. See the full list of supported attributes. Bounding in time with dynamic policy enforcement on short-lived sessions ensures authorization is based on up-to-date policy. A request is evaluated against the authorization policies when it arrives to the proxy. same namespace as the authorization policy. The matching criteria includes the metadata associated with a proxy, All communication should be secure, regardless of network location. This AuthorizationPolicy is applied to the catalog workload in the backyards-demo namespace, and while not explicitly specified, its an ALLOW rule, so it will deny all traffic that doesnt match the rules described here. AuthorizationPolicies on the other hand have DENY and ALLOW rules as well, that complicates things a bit, but again, allows for more flexible rules. An authorization policy contains a list of rules, that describe which requests are matched, and then allowed or denied based on the action. Istio Authorization can be used to enforce access control rules between workloads. Network reachability is not authorization. To start experimenting with Istio and AuthorizationPolicies, we suggest to try Backyards (now Cisco Service Mesh Manager) and get up and running with an example application in minutes. Azure AKS. If any ALLOW policies are applied to a workload, traffic is denied to that workload by default, and only those requests that are explicitly configured are allowed. that the proxy provides to Istio during the initial handshake. Istio Archive Steps to reproduce the bug The new model simplifies configuration (one CRD instead of three), supports ingress and egress gateways, and better aligns with the Istio configuration model, as it is applied to workloads instead of services. If not set, any path is allowed. So should you use Istio AuthorizationPolicies over plain Kubernetes NetworkPolicies? Must be used only with HTTP. For example the below example matches request header values: Finally, take a look at a more complex rule to see how it matches requests when most fields contain multiple entries: This final example contains two separate rules in one policy with an ALLOW action. - workload selector can be used to further restrict where a policy applies. By clicking Sign up for GitHub, you agree to our terms of service and When the spec/selector field is omitted, the rules are namespace-wide. So for example notNamespaces: default would match sources from all namespaces, except from default. Access control is enabled on a workload if there is any authorization policies selecting Kubernetes network policies are implemented by different networking solutions, like Calico. Weve blogged a lot about connect, even more about observe, and also had a few articles about secure. All communication should be encrypted. The rules contain a source, that means that traffic is allowed only from a workload with the cluster.local/ns/backyards-demo/sa/frontpage identity (service account). The control plane on the other hand is accepting user configuration through CRDs, and - among a few other things - transforms these CRDs to Envoy configuration and delivers it to the proxies. Fine-grained policy. Optional. The following authorization policy applies to all workloads in namespace foo. It also contains an operation, that only matches GET requests. Frequent policy evaluation. It could be a bit confusing at first, especially that the default action is ALLOW, so a policy like this will deny all traffic in a namespace: The deny policies take precedence over allow policies, so for example if there are conflicting rules, where a policy allows GET requests, and another denies them, the deny policy will be applied. WorkloadSelector specifies the criteria used to determine if a policy can be applied As much information as possible should be collected and used to improve security posture. Currently, only label based selection mechanism is supported. For organizations operating in a federal regulatory environment, Tetrate Istio Distro is the only distribution of Istio with FIPS-verified builds available. If not set, any request principal is allowed. - Prefix match: abc will match on value abc and abcd. This post tries to fill that gap, and discusses Istios access control model, or more specifically AuthorizationPolicies. But so far, we havent really touched control. Optional. Secure, authentic communication. These policies are additive, they do not conflict, and order of evaluation is irrelevant. It must be explicitly authenticated and authorized as well. As Kubernetes is primarily focused on orchestration, resource management, and basic connectivity, it leaves zero trust networking security concerns to be addressed by other parties. When access is granted, it should be granted with the least privilege required. The namespace of the resource determines the namespace where the rules will be enforced. The following authorization policy applies to workloads containing label question. The service mesh code is independent of the application so its lifecycle can be managed independently and it cant be modified at runtime. External Authorization. Istio Authorization Policy enables access control on workloads in the mesh. Service identity and end-user credentials are dynamically authenticated and authorized before any access is allowed. Unlike NetworkPolicies, AuthorizationPolicies support both ALLOW and DENY actions. It allows requests from: Just like with the PeerAuthentication resource, putting it in the root Istio namespace (usually istio-system), without a selector has a special effect: these rules will be enforced mesh-wide, in all namespaces. which means requests to the workload will be rejected if the request is not allowed by any of 1.2.3.4) and CIDR (e.g. In most cases the when field can be omitted, its usually only used in complex scenarios, but it can be used to further customize request matching with a list of supported Istio attributes. Optional. Hi all, when the request has a valid JWT token issued by https://accounts.google.com. And, as a dedicated infrastructure layer, Istio offers: To learn more about how to implement zero trust architecture, from a co-author of the federal security standards, read Zack Butchers Zero Trust Architecture white paper. Authenticated and authorized workloads are protected from perimeter breaches. As a companion to NISTs standards for zero trust architecture in general, NIST has also published standards for how to apply zero trust principles specifically to microservices applications. In the standard, NIST establishes a reference platform consisting of Kubernetes for orchestration and resource management with the Istio service mesh to provide the core security features. Because Envoy understands different protocols (most commonly HTTP), it allows for a rich set of attributes to base policy decisions on. the authorization policies selecting the workload. configured to istio-config). Those resources were part of the v1alpha1 API, that is now completely replaced by the v1beta1 API. So to recap, the above policy allows GET requests from workloads with the cluster.local/ns/backyards-demo/sa/frontpage identity to backyard-demo/catalog, and denies everything else. This issue or pull request has been closed due to not having had activity from an Istio team member since 2021-01-13. This should apply to all inbound, outbound, and service-to-service access. - namespace test We've blogged a lot about connect, even more about observe, and also had a few articles about secure. Zero trust network architecture inverts the assumptions of perimeter security. Bounding in time limits the risk of compromised credentials. - Suffix match: abc will match on value abc and xabc. Optional. First, lets see how are these rules enforced in Istio. (Assuming the root namespace is In the example, the source is a principal, but it can be requestPrincipals, namespaces or ipBlocks as well. if multiple authorization policies apply to the same workload, the effect is additive. AuthorizationPolicies can be mesh-, namespace-, and workload-wide depending on the namespace and the spec/selector field. And, the mesh is a tightly controlled element of the system that can be hardened with more eyes and closer inspection (NIST SP 800-204B, 5.1). iss/sub claims), which Encryption and strong workload identity limits reconnaissance and provides for authenticity of communication. Have a question about this project? Fine-grained observability allows real-time assurance and post-facto auditability of policy enforcement plus the necessary data for troubleshooting and analysis. For example, the following authorization policy applies to workloads matched with If not set, any host is allowed. Bounding in time limits the risk of compromised credentials. To establish zero trust security guidelines for industry and the U.S. federal government, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) establishes zero trust security guidelines in a series of publications starting with SP 800-207 on zero trust architecture in general and its companion SP 800-204 series on security standards for microservices. When a NetworkPolicy selects a specific pod, that pod will reject any connections, except those that are explicitly allowed. the workload. Optional. Any string field in the rule supports Exact, Prefix, Suffix and Presence match: Bounding in space allows for high granularity of policy enforcement. Optional. Access to resources should be bounded in time. the configuration namespace in which the resource is present. to access the workload with: from specifies the source of a request. Cvss scores, vulnerability details and links to full CVE details and references Rule allows access from a list of sources to perform a list of operations when If not set, access is denied unless explicitly allowed by other authorization policy. Limited blast radius of perimeter breaches prevents lateral movement by attackers. Istio policy enforcement works at the application layer (L7), - thats where the Envoy proxies operate - while Kubernetes network policies work at the network (L3) and transport layers (L4). All checks are performed runtime by the Envoy proxys authorization engine. Rules are built of three parts: sources, operations and conditions. Network location and reachability do not imply trust. Register for an evaluation version](https://eti.cisco.com/appnet/smm/download) and run the following command to install the CLI tool (KUBECONFIG must be set for your cluster): Register for the free tier version of Cisco Service Mesh Manager (formerly called Banzai Cloud Backyards) and follow the Getting Started Guide for up-to-date instructions on the installation. to your account. Well occasionally send you account related emails. The main networking security gaps in Kubernetes are (NIST SP 800-204B, 2.1.1): To augment Kubernetes for security, Istio acts as a security kernel in the NIST reference architecture. apiVersion: security.istio.io/v1beta1 kind: AuthorizationPolicy metadata: name: policy namespace: istio - config spec: selector: matchLabels: version: v1. The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: mTLS is enabled between sidecars where possible by default: https://preliminary.istio.io/latest/docs/ops/configuration/traffic-management/tls-configuration/#auto-mtls. These solutions are running a controller thats watching NetworkPolicies, and configures the underlying networking layer accordingly. A list of ports, which matches to the destination.port attribute. label selector app: httpbin, version: v1. Also, insights gained from observing should be fed back to improve policy. Unlike perimeter security, access to a service is not granted solely because that service is reachable. This ensures that access decisions are made frequently and with the most recent context available. Here are NISTs core zero trust architecture principles and the Kubernetes and Istio reference architecture recommended to apply them in practice. When no AuthorizationPolicies select a workload, all requests are allowed. When access control is enabled, the default behavior is deny (deny-by-default) For someone whos just getting to know Istio, it can be confusing that they may bump into blog posts about Istio access control containing mentions of CRDs like ClusterRbacConfig, ServiceRole, ServiceRoleBinding. foo. When talking about AuthorizationPolicies, we have to mention Kubernetes NetworkPolicies, because they are quite similar in terms of what problem they are trying to solve. Using istio operator 1.7.2 Istio Authorization Policy enables access control on workloads in the mesh. Istio uses mutual TLS to securely pass some information . - GET method at paths of prefix /info or, If youre looking for a migration path, Id recommend to read the official blog post. Operations are listed in the to field, and answer the what? Expected behavior Thank you for your contributions. Lets take a look at the operation field as well: along methods, valid matchers are hosts, ports, paths and their exclusion pairs, like notHosts. attribute. A list of rules to specify the allowed access to the workload. Optional. in namespace foo. When multiple policies are applied to the same workload, Istio applies them additively. 1.4.6 2019 Istio Authors, Privacy PolicyArchived on March 5, 2020. Or you can even use the two concepts side-by-side. Operating at the application layer has its advantages. If youre reading this article, you should already be familiar with Istios high level architecture, but heres a (very) brief recap. As the documentation says, we should have mtls enabled in our cluster or the microservices that want to user AuthiorizationPolicy using the principal field. Traditional network security relies on a strong defensive perimeter around a trusted internal network to keep bad actors out and sensitive data in. If youre looking for the fastest way to get to production with Istio, check out our open source Tetrate Istio Distro (TID) is a vetted, upstream distribution of Istioa hardened image of Istio with continued support that is simpler to install, manage, and upgrade. version: v1 in all namespaces in the mesh. The following is a workload-wide policy, that applies to pods in the backyards-demo namespace that have the app=catalog label. Mutual TLS must be enabled before using any of the following fields in the authorization policy: Reference: https://istio.io/v1.7/docs/concepts/security/#dependency-on-mutual-tls, The point is, we apply this configuration bellow and the AuthorizationPolicy is working without mTls enabled. The name of an Istio attribute. selected. When CUSTOM, DENY and ALLOW actions are used for a workload at the same time, the CUSTOM action is evaluated first, then the DENY action, and finally the ALLOW action. The sidecars are Envoy proxies, and the control plane is now basically a single service, called istiod. Sign in to specifies the operation of a request. A list of namespaces, which matches to the source.namespace Well, it always depends on your use case. - Presence match: * will match when value is not empty. Single IP (e.g. The AuthorizationPolicy should not work? This post tries to fill that gap, and discusses Istio's access control model, or more specifically AuthorizationPolicies. Created by the issue and PR lifecycle manager. Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Access requests inside an enterprise-owned or other private network must meet the same security requirements as communication from any other location. This means that If set to root Condition specifies additional required attributes. - service account cluster.local/ns/default/sa/sleep or It gives the user a very powerful and flexible, yet performant way of authorization between Kubernetes workloads.