How do you adopt a zero-trust approach for your microservices architecture?

Granular policies encompass specific and context-aware security and access control rules. To adopt a zero-trust approach for your microservices architecture, you can start by identifying domains and critical assets. Implement strong authentication and authorization, enforce the principle of least privilege, segment your network, encrypt all traffic, and proactively monitor and respond to potential threats. By incorporating granular policies, organizations can enhance their security, meet regulatory compliance, and ensure precise resource access while mitigating unauthorized access risks.

To adopt a zero-trust approach for your microservices architecture, assess each service's security individually. Use strong authentication, like mutual TLS, and enforce the principle of least privilege for authorization. Employ encryption for data in transit and at rest. Regularly update dependencies, monitor for anomalies, and conduct security audits. Foster a security-aware culture and integrate security into the development life cycle. Leverage container orchestration tools and service meshes for added security. Review and update security policies regularly and have robust incident response plans in place.

In my experience defining the domains of each micro service is the key factor: Recognize the domain and allocate roles to your microservices. In situations where a microservice requires information from a different domain, it should accomplish this by initiating a request and obtaining the response from the domain's owner. Segment your microservices architecture into more compact sections or zones. Each individual segment should possess restricted access and communication abilities. This practice thwarts any potential lateral progression within the network in case of a security breach.

Essentially, by siloing a network’s set of services and then eliminating their ability to trust one another we can increase security. If you find that you are unable to remove trust in your microservices architecture, the least you can do is minimize trust between services.?

Open Policy Agent (OPA): Flexible policy engine for defining and enforcing policies in microservices and cloud-native applications. Kyverno: Kubernetes-native policy management tool for defining and enforcing policies in microservices deployed on Kubernetes. Gatekeeper: Admission controller for Kubernetes using OPA policies to validate and enforce configurations of microservices in Kubernetes clusters. K-Rail: Tool for enforcing best practices, security policies, and compliance checks for microservices and workloads in Kubernetes environments.

let’s imagine a bustling city, where each building represents a microservice in your system. Now, in this city, there are many important messages that need to be delivered from one building to another. No building trusts any other by default(“zero-trust” approach). Every message that leaves a building is put in a secure, tamper-proof container (this is the encryption). This container can only be opened by the intended recipient building (this is where TLS or SSL protocols come into play). Each building has a unique certificate(like an ID card), which it uses to authenticate itself when sending a message. The post office(service mesh like Istio or Linkerd) takes care of all the messages details into secure containers, checking certificates.

Encryption not only prevents third parties from intercepting and viewing your data in transit, but also thwarts man-in-the-middle attacks. You definitely don’t want credit card data to be visible to unauthorized entities on the network.

I have heard of cases where the encryption or non-encrypted data was hacked. Straight down from the US gov't itself every time, no kidding. You are better off with an access policy into your own network to protect your data and business processes.

It's plausible to have the idea of encrypting all traffic, however, it's important to keep in mind that making communication too difficult can have consequences, especially if the encryption is at an application level.

Well let's also assume an open door policy to your business as well and then it's zero-trust (From many before me). Let's also assume you are doing it alone. Yes, go zero-trust, give everyone a terminal and a web link to your network, and don't restrict web pages or links at any level before the service mesh is implemented. If you unsimplify, you could write a book on security layers. And you find that good business managers have briefings and simply can't stand security "too late" or "not in the right place". So get it right and use the bottom most layer to protect everything.

while TLS provides secure communication between a client and a server, mTLS takes it a step further by ensuring that both parties are authenticated. mTLS is essential in scenarios where you need a high degree of assurance about the identities of both communicating entities, but it also requires additional setup and management of certificates, making it more complex to implement.TLS is commonly used for securing web traffic (HTTPS), email (SMTP, IMAP), and various other client-server communications.mTLS is commonly used in more stringent security scenarios, such as secure API-to-API communication, IoT device authentication, and other situations where verifying the identity of both parties is critical.

Implementing mutual authentication can be more effective when leveraging identity federation. By integrating with federated identity providers, you can manage authentication across different domains and environments more seamlessly. This ensures a unified authentication mechanism for all microservices, regardless of their deployment location, enhancing security and simplifying identity management.

And what a huge job that would be in a huge operation where there is no ability to crunch data, search for data on one PC and no one knows binary (embarrassed cough). I don't know binary. Yes, all good tools but not even close to enough in a large company. This brings up another crucial point about the use of third-party websites, and if they guard your data and follow government regulations. Boy had they better. You would learn more from reading about lawsuits in articles from 20 years ago; plenty of buzzwords in there.

Incorporate automated vulnerability scanning into your CI/CD pipeline to identify potential security issues before they reach production. By regularly scanning your code, dependencies, and infrastructure for known vulnerabilities, you can address security issues proactively. This not only aligns with a zero-trust approach but also supports continuous compliance with security standards and regulations.

Expire and Rotate the passwords / tokens often. Any authentication tokens or passwords that are used for the micro services needs to be rotated often.

Zero trust within microservices means authenticating, authorizing, and encrypting every request both inside and outside of the internal ones. Provide proper authentication to all services by using OAuth2, JWT, or mutual TLS. Later apply RBAC and the least-privilege principle in such a way that services cannot access more than what they need. Segment the network and make use of utility tools like Istio in service mesh to securely manage service-to-service communication. Continuously monitor and log the traffic, inspect for any deviant behavior on top of regular updating and patching of the system to stay away from vulnerabilities. A zero-trust architecture does not trust anything—not even one single thing.