Biblio

The service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer in a microservice architecture. It manages service-to-service communication within an application between decoupled or loosely coupled microservices (called services) without modifying their implementations. The service mesh includes APIs for security, traffic and policy management, and observability features. These features are enabled using a pre-defined configuration, which can be changed at runtime with human intervention. However, it has no autonomy to self-manage changes to the microservice application’s operational environment. A better configuration is one that can be customized according to environmental conditions during execution to protect the application from potential threats. This customization requires enabling self-protection mechanisms within the service mesh that evaluate the risk of environmental condition changes and enable appropriate configurations to defend the application from impending threats. In this paper, we design an assessment component into a service mesh that includes a security assurance case to define the threat model and dynamically assess the application given environment changes. We experiment with a demo application, Bookinfo, using an open-source service mesh platform, Istio, to enable self-protection. We consider certain parameters extracted from the service request as environmental conditions. We evaluate those parameters against the threat model and determine the risk of violating a security requirement for controlled and authorized information flow.

As Edge deployments move closer towards the end devices, low latency communication among Edge aware applications is one of the key tenants of Edge service offerings. In order to simplify application development, service mesh architectures have emerged as the evolutionary architectural paradigms for taking care of bulk of application communication logic such as health checks, circuit breaking, secure communication, resiliency (among others), thereby decoupling application logic with communication infrastructure. The latency to throughput ratio needs to be measurable for high performant deployments at the Edge. Providing benchmark data for various edge deployments with Bare Metal and virtual machine-based scenarios, this paper digs into architectural complexities of deploying service mesh at edge environment, performance impact across north-south and east-west communications in and out of a service mesh leveraging popular open-source service mesh Istio/Envoy using a simple on-prem Kubernetes cluster. The performance results shared indicate performance impact of Kubernetes network stack with Envoy data plane. Microarchitecture analyses indicate bottlenecks in Linux based stacks from a CPU micro-architecture perspective and quantify the high impact of Linux's Iptables rule matching at scale. We conclude with the challenges in multiple areas of profiling and benchmarking requirement and a call to action for deploying a service mesh, in latency sensitive environments at Edge.

Zero Trust security model permits to secure cloud native applications while encrypting all network communication, authenticating, and authorizing every request. The service mesh can enable Zero Trust using a side-car proxy without changes to the application code. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has provided a performance analysis of Zero Trust in a multi-cloud environment. This paper proposes a multi-cloud framework and a testing workflow to analyse performance of the data plane under load and the impact on the control plane, when Zero Trust is enabled. The results of preliminary tests show that Istio has reduced latency variability in responding to sequential HTTP requests. Results also reveal that the overall CPU and memory usage can increase based on service mesh configuration and the cloud environment.

Modern cloud applications can consist of hundreds of services with thousands of instances. In order to solve the problems of interservice interaction in this highly dynamic environment, an additional software infrastructure layer called service mesh is introduced. This layer provides a single point of interaction with the network for each service. Service mesh mechanisms are responsible for: load balancing, processing of network requests, service discovery, authentication, authorization, etc. However, the following questions arise: complex key management, fine-grained access control at the application level, confidentiality of data and many-to-many communications. It is possible to solve these problems with Attribute-based encryption (ABE) methods. This paper presents an abstract model of a service mesh and a protocol for interservice communications, which uses ABE for authorization and confidentiality of the messages.

With the advancements in enterprise-level business development, the demand for new applications and services is overwhelming. For the development and delivery of such applications and services, enterprise businesses rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). API management and classification is a cumbersome task considering the rapid increase in the number of APIs, and API to API calls. API Mashups, domain APIs and API service mesh are a few recommended techniques for ease of API creation, management, and monitoring. API service mesh is considered as one of the techniques in this regard, in which the service plane and the control plane are separated for improving efficiency as well as security. In this paper, we propose and implement a security framework for the creation of a secure API service mesh using Istio and Kubernetes. Afterwards, we propose an smart association model for automatic association of new APIs to already existing categories of service mesh. To the best of our knowledge, this smart association model is the first of its kind.