Everyone building or operating cloud native applications must understand the fundamentals of security issues and modern threat models. Although this topic is vast, in this talk Nic and Daniel will focus on the end-to-end communication and higher-level networking threats, and explore how the combination of an edge proxy and service mesh using TLS and mTLS can be used to mitigate many man-in-the-middle attacks.
Key takeaways include: understand the "three pillars" of service mesh functionality - observability, reliability, and security; a service mesh is in a unique place to enforce security features like mTLS; learn how to ensure that there are no exploitable "gaps" within the end-to-end/user-to-service communication path, explore the differences in ingress/mesh control planes, with brief demonstrations using Ambassador and Consul Connect.
3. tl;dr
▪ Security is everyone’s responsibility
▪ Application modernisation leads to heterogeneous infra/networks
▪ Defence in depth is vital: edge/service comms security is one part of this
▪ Mind the gap(s)!
▪ All security must have good UX / DevEx
4. Who are we?
Nic Jackson
Developer Advocate, HashiCorp
@sheriffjackson
Daniel Bryant
Product Architect, Datawire
@danielbryantuk
6. So, we don’t want to scare you, but...
214
Records containing personal data are exploited every second
7. So, we don’t want to scare you, but...
$3,860,000
Is the average cost of a data breach
8. So, we don’t want to scare you, but...
$350,00,000
Is the cost of a breach containing over 50 million records
9. So, we don’t want to scare you, but...
72%
Increase in attacks between 2017 and 2018
Gemalto Breach Level Index:
https://breachlevelindex.com/
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Study:
https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach
12. Defence in depth is vital
▪ Harden and scan infrastructure
▪ Scan code, dependencies, packages
▪ Encrypt data at rest
▪ Encrypt data in transit
▪ Principle of least privilege
13. ▪ Harden and scan infrastructure
▪ Scan code, dependencies, packages
▪ Encrypt data at rest
▪ Encrypt data in transit
▪ Principle of least privilege
Defence in depth is vital
23. Service Mesh: Proxy mesh, Fabric model...
▪ Exposes internal services to internal consumers
▪ Encapsulates service infra: across k8s, VMs, bare metal etc
▪ mTLS: service identity and traffic encryption
▪ ACLs and intentions: infra/service identity-based access
▪ Enforce metadata (but apps need to propagate headers/tokens)
39. Conclusion
▪ Security is everyone’s responsibility
▪ Application modernisation leads to heterogeneous infra/networks
▪ Defence in depth is vital: edge/service comms security is one part of this
▪ Mind the gap(s)!
▪ All security must have good UX / DevEx