Istio in Action

9 Securing microservice communication

This chapter covers

• Handling service-to-service authentication and authorization in the service mesh
• Handling end-user authentication and authorization

In chapter 4, we covered admitting traffic into the mesh, including some ways to secure that traffic. Here, we take a closer look at transparently improving the security posture of a services-based architecture by using the capabilities of the service mesh.

Istio is secure by default. In this chapter, we see what that means, how it works, how service-to-service and end-user authentication are implemented, and the access control we have over services in the service mesh. Before getting to the features, we give a brief refresher of security topics; see appendix ...