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Mutual TLS Authentication

April 8, 2020 - By: Thomas Jungbauer ( Lastmod: 2021-08-14 ) - 4 min read

When more and more microservices are involved in an application, more and more traffic is sent on the network. It should be considered to secure this traffic, to prevent the possibility to inject malicious packets. Mutual TLS/mTLS authentication or two-way authentication offers a way to encrypt service traffic with certificates.

With Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, Mutual TLS can be used without the microservice knowing that it is happening. The TLS is managed completely by the Service Mesh Operator between two Envoy proxies using a defined mTLS policy.

Issue 9 of OpenShift 4 and Service Mesh will explain how to enable Mutual TLS inside the Service Mesh to secure the traffic between the different microservices.

How does it work?

If a microservice sends a request to a server, it must pass the local sidecar Envoy proxy first.
The proxy will intercept the outbound request and starts a mutual TLS handshake with the proxy at the server side. During this handshake the certificates are exchanged and loaded into the proxy containers by Service Mesh.
The client side Envoy starts a mutual TLS handshake with the server side Envoy.
The client proxy does a secure naming check on the server’s certificate to verify that the identity in the certificate is authorized.
A mutual TLS connection is established between the client and the server.
The Envoy proxy at the server sides decrypts the traffic and forwards it to the application through a local TCP connection.

Preparations

Before we can start be sure that the services are setup like in Issue #3.
In addition, be sure that the following DestinationRule already exists:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: recommendation
spec:
  host: recommendation
  subsets:
  - labels:
      version: v1
    name: version-v1
  - labels:
      version: v2
    name: version-v2

Now we will create a pod, which is running outside of the Service Mesh. It will not have a sidecar proxy and will simply curl our application.

Store the following yaml and create the object in our cluster.

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: curl
    version: v1
  name: curl
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: curl
      version: v1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: curl
        version: v1
      annotations: (1)
        sidecar.istio.io/proxyCPU: "500m"
        sidecar.istio.io/proxyMemory: 400Mi
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: quay.io/maistra_demos/curl:latest
        command: ["/bin/sleep", "3650d"]
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: curl

1	since no sidecar is injected (sidecar.istio.io/inject: "true"), only 1 container will be started.

The traffic coming from the microservice customer AND from the external client curl must be simulated. To achieve this the following shell script can be used:

#!/bin/sh

export CURL_POD=$(oc get pods -n tutorial -l app=curl | grep curl | awk '{ print $1}' )
export CUSTOMER_POD=$(oc get pods -n tutorial -l app=customer | grep customer | awk '{ print $1}' )

echo "A load generating script is running in the next step. Ctrl+C to stop"

while :; do

echo "Executing curl in curl pod"
oc exec -n tutorial $CURL_POD -- curl -s http://preference:8080 > /dev/null
sleep 0.5

echo "Executing curl in customer pod"
oc exec -n tutorial $CUSTOMER_POD -c customer -- curl -s http://preference:8080 > /dev/null

sleep 0.5

done

By executing this, it will first execute a curl command out of the curl pod and then the same curl command out of the customer container. Kepp this script running

Enabling Mutual TLS

Lets execute the shell script above and verify Kiali. As you notice there are requests coming from the customer microservice and from the source called unknown, which is the curl-service running outside the Service Mesh.

Figure 1. Kiali: traffic coming from customer microserver and external pod

Enable the policy by creating the following object:

apiVersion: "authentication.istio.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Policy"
metadata:
  name: "preference-mutualtls"
spec:
  targets:
  - name: preference
  peers:
  - mtls:
      mode: STRICT (1)

1	We are enforcing mtls for the target preference

After a few seconds the curl pod cannot reach the application anymore:

Executing curl in curl pod
command terminated with exit code 56
Executing curl in customer pod
Executing curl in curl pod
command terminated with exit code 56
Executing curl in customer pod
Executing curl in curl pod
command terminated with exit code 5

This is expected, since the preference service allows traffic over mutual TLS only. This was enforced by the Policy object (STRICT mode). The customer service, which is running inside the Service Mesh receives the error "5053 Service Unavalable" since it tries to send traffic, but it does not know yet to use mTLS.

In Kiali you will see the following:

Figure 2. Kiali: traffic is blocked

The curl pod is greyed out, since the traffic it tries to send, never reaches the preference service and is therefor not counted in the metric.

To make customer aware that mutual TLS shall be used, a DestinationRule must be configured:

apiVersion: "networking.istio.io/v1alpha3"
kind: "DestinationRule"
metadata:
  name: "preference-destination-rule"
spec:
  host: "preference"
  trafficPolicy:
    tls:
      mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL (1)

1	Let’s use mTLS

This defines that ISTIO_MUTUAL shall be used for the service preference. The customer service recognizes this and automatically enables mTLS. After a few minutes the traffic graph in Kiali will show "green" traffic from customer through preference to _recommendation:

Figure 3. Kiali: traffic for Service Mesh components is fine again.

Mutual TLS Migration

As you can see in the previous section, the curl pod cannot reach the application inside the Service Mesh. This happens because prefernce is strictly enforcing encrypted traffic, but curl only sends plain text. Luckily, Istio provides a method to gradually monitor the traffic and migrate to mTLS. Instead of STRICT mode PERMISSIVE can be used. Enabling permissive mode, preference will accept both, encrypted and plain-text traffic.

Replace the Policy object with the following configuration:

apiVersion: "authentication.istio.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Policy"
metadata:
  name: "preference-mutualtls"
spec:
  targets:
  - name: preference
  peers:
  - mtls:
      mode: PERMISSIVE

oc replace -f Policy-permissive.yaml

Now let’s wait a few minutes and observe Kiali, which should end up with:

Figure 4. Kiali: Encrypted and Plain-Text traffic

As you can see with the lock icon, the traffic between cunstomer and preference is encrypted, while the traffic from unknown (which is our curl pod), is plain-text.

The errors you may see in Kiali happen due a known issue: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/MAISTRA-1000

Cleanup

Clean up your environment:

oc delete policy -n tutorial preference-mutualtls
oc delete destinationrule -n tutorial preference-destination-rule

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