Securing Microservices Communication

Istio secures communication between microservices without microservices requiring any code changes. In Chapter 4, we briefly touched upon the topic of security. We configured transport layer security by exposing our sockshop application over HTTPS. We created certificates and configured the Istio Ingress gateway to bind those certificates to hostnames in SIMPLE TLS mode. We also implemented TLS-based security for multiple hosts managed by a single Ingress gateway.

In this chapter, we will dive deeper into some advanced topics of security. We will start by understanding Istio security architecture. We will implement mutual TLS for service communication with other services in the mesh, and we will also implement mutual TLS with downstream clients outside the mesh. We will then perform various hands-on exercises to create custom security policies for authentication and authorization. We will go through these topics in the following order:

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