Configuring transport security

In Anthos Service Mesh 1.5 and later, auto mutual TLS (auto mTLS) is enabled by default. With auto mTLS, a client sidecar proxy automatically detects if the server has a sidecar. The client sidecar sends mTLS to workloads with sidecars and sends plain text to workloads without sidecars. Note, however, services accept both plain text and mTLS traffic. As you inject sidecar proxies to your Pods, we recommend that you also configure your services to only accept mTLS traffic.

With Anthos Service Mesh, you can enforce mTLS, outside of your application code, by applying a single YAML file. Anthos Service Mesh gives you the flexibility to apply an authentication policy to the entire service mesh, to a namespace, or to an individual workload.

Enforcing mesh-wide mTLS

To prevent all your services in the mesh from accepting plain-text traffic, set a mesh-wide PeerAuthentication policy with the mTLS mode set to STRICT (the default is PERMISSIVE). The mesh-wide PeerAuthentication policy shouldn't have a selector and must be applied in the root namespace, istio-system. When you deploy the policy, the control plane automatically provisions TLS certificates so that workloads can authenticate with each other.

To enforce mesh-wide mTLS:

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: "security.istio.io/v1beta1"
kind: "PeerAuthentication"
metadata:
  name: "AUTH_POLICY_NAME"
  namespace: "istio-system"
spec:
  mtls:
    mode: STRICT
EOF

Expected output:

peerauthentication.security.istio.io/AUTH_POLICY_NAME created

Enable mutual TLS per namespace

To enable mTLS for all workloads within a particular namespace, use a namespace-wide authentication policy. The specification of the policy is the same as for a mesh-wide policy, but you specify the namespace it applies to under metadata.

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: "security.istio.io/v1beta1"
kind: "PeerAuthentication"
metadata:
  name: "AUTH_POLICY_NAME"
  namespace: "NAMESPACE"
spec:
  mtls:
    mode: STRICT
EOF

Expected output:

peerauthentication.security.istio.io/AUTH_POLICY_NAME created

Enable mutual TLS per workload

To set a PeerAuthentication policy for a specific workload, you must configure the selector section and specify the labels that match the desired workload. However, Anthos Service Mesh can't aggregate workload-level policies for outbound mTLS traffic to a service. You need to configure a destination rule to manage that behavior.

1. Apply an authentication policy to a specific workload in your namespace:

   cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n NAMESPACE -f -
   apiVersion: "security.istio.io/v1beta1"
   kind: "PeerAuthentication"
   metadata:
     name: "AUTH_POLICY_NAME"
     namespace: "NAMESPACE"
   spec:
     selector:
       matchLabels:
         app: WORKLOAD
     mtls:
       mode: STRICT
   EOF
   

   Expected output:

   peerauthentication.security.istio.io/AUTH_POLICY_NAME created

2. Configure a matching destination rule:

   cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n NAMESPACE -f -
   apiVersion: "networking.istio.io/v1alpha3"
   kind: "DestinationRule"
   metadata:
     name: "DEST_RULE_NAME"
   spec:
     host: "WORKLOAD.NAMESPACE.svc.cluster.local"
     trafficPolicy:
       tls:
         mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL
   EOF
   

   Expected output:

   destinationrule.networking.istio.io/WORKLOAD created

Finding and deleting PeerAuthentication policies

For a list of all the PeerAuthentication polices in the service mesh:

kubectl get peerauthentication --all-namespaces

If there is a PeerAuthentication policy in force, you can delete it with kubectl delete:

kubectl delete peerauthentication -n NAMESPACE AUTH_POLICY_NAME

What's next

• Learn about security in Anthos Service Mesh