Microservice security is too hard. We must issue and rotate TLS certificates, deploy identity providers, and embed auth logic in applications. These all require secure development, test, and maintenance effort. Istio (a Google, IBM, and Lyft project) offers a new way: by providing a service mesh and a unified identity for each request, it offers all of these things with zero application changes. In this talk we describe:

– Why all applications should use encryption by default

– What a service mesh is, and why Istio may revolutionise microservices

– Why a service mesh can increase application security and availability

– How to get “free” mutual TLS between all services and rotate certs every hour

– How to prevent replay attacks using “mints”

– How to securely delegate requests between microservices