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Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Microservice Security

Introduction

Microservice architectures distribute application functionality across multiple independent services, each with its own data store, API, and deployment lifecycle. This distribution increases the attack surface — intra-service communication must be secured, secrets must be distributed without exposure, and visibility must span service boundaries.

Service Mesh mTLS

A service mesh provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication. It transparently encrypts traffic between services using mutual TLS (mTLS).

Istio mTLS Configuration

Enable mTLS across the mesh

apiVersion: security.istio.io/v1beta1

kind: PeerAuthentication

metadata:

name: default

namespace: istio-system

spec:

mtls:

mode: STRICT # Reject plain-text traffic

Per-namespace mTLS policy

apiVersion: security.istio.io/v1beta1

kind: PeerAuthentication

metadata:

name: payment-service

namespace: production

spec:

selector:

matchLabels:

app: payment-service

mtls:

mode: STRICT

portLevelMtls:

8080:

mode: DISABLE # Allow plaintext for health checks only

Authorization policy for service-to-service access

apiVersion: security.istio.io/v1beta1

kind: AuthorizationPolicy

metadata:

name: payment-service-authz

namespace: production

spec:

selector:

matchLabels:

app: payment-service

rules:

---

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