Service mesh

The Contrast service mesh secures the communication of the workload by automatically wrapping the network traffic inside mutual TLS (mTLS) connections. The verification of the endpoints in the connection establishment is based on certificates that are part of the PKI of the Coordinator.

The service mesh can be enabled on a per-workload basis by adding a service mesh configuration to the workload's object annotations. During the contrast generate step, the service mesh is added as a sidecar container to all workloads which have a specified configuration. The service mesh container first sets up iptables rules based on its configuration and then starts Envoy for TLS origination and termination.

Configuring the proxy

The service mesh container can be configured using the following object annotations:

• contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-ingress to configure ingress.
• contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-egress to configure egress.
• contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-admin-interface-port to configure the Envoy admin interface. If not specified, no admin interface will be started.

If you aren't using the automatic service mesh injection and want to configure the service mesh manually, set the environment variables CONTRAST_INGRESS_PROXY_CONFIG, CONTRAST_EGRESS_PROXY_CONFIG and CONTRAST_ADMIN_PORT in the service mesh sidecar directly.

Ingress

All TCP ingress traffic is routed over Envoy by default. Since we use TPROXY, the destination address remains the same throughout the packet handling.

Any incoming connection is required to present a client certificate signed by the mesh CA certificate. Envoy presents a certificate chain of the mesh certificate of the workload and the intermediate CA certificate as the server certificate.

If the deployment contains workloads which should be reachable from outside the Service Mesh, while still handing out the certificate chain, disable client authentication by setting the annotation contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-ingress as <name>#<port>#false. Separate multiple entries with ##. You can choose any descriptive string identifying the service on the given port for the <name> field, as it's only informational.

Disable redirection and TLS termination altogether by specifying <name>#<port>#true. This can be beneficial if the workload itself handles TLS on that port or if the information exposed on this port is non-sensitive.

The following example workload exposes a web service on port 8080 and metrics on port 7890. The web server is exposed to a 3rd party end-user which wants to verify the deployment, therefore it's still required that the server hands out it certificate chain signed by the mesh CA certificate. The metrics should be exposed via TCP without TLS.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: web
  annotations:
    contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-ingress: "web#8080#false##metrics#7890#true"
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    spec:
      runtimeClassName: contrast-cc
      containers:
        - name: web-svc
          image: ghcr.io/edgelesssys/frontend:v1.2.3@...
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080
              name: web
            - containerPort: 7890
              name: metrics

When invoking contrast generate, the resulting deployment will be injected with the Contrast service mesh as an init container.

# ...
      initContainers:
        - env:
            - name: CONTRAST_INGRESS_PROXY_CONFIG
              value: "web#8080#false##metrics#7890#true"
          image: "ghcr.io/edgelesssys/contrast/service-mesh-proxy:v1.2.0@sha256:756818aff3c61cc4852ef551a2fabfa90269d0b0a53d50c0e32fe448bac4d994"
          name: contrast-service-mesh
          restartPolicy: Always
          securityContext:
            capabilities:
              add:
                - NET_ADMIN
            privileged: true
          volumeMounts:
            - name: contrast-secrets
              mountPath: /contrast

Note, that changing the environment variables of the sidecar container directly will only have an effect if the workload isn't configured to automatically generate a service mesh component on contrast generate. Otherwise, the service mesh sidecar container will be regenerated on every invocation of the command.

Egress

To be able to route the egress traffic of the workload through Envoy, the remote endpoints' IP address and port must be configurable.

• Choose an IP address inside the 127.0.0.0/8 CIDR and a port not yet in use by the pod.
• Configure the workload to connect to this IP address and port.
• Set <name>#<chosen IP>:<chosen port>#<original-hostname-or-ip>:<original-port> as the contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-egress workload annotation. Separate multiple entries with ##. Choose any string identifying the service on the given port as <name>.

This redirects the traffic over Envoy. The endpoint must present a valid certificate chain which must be verifiable with the mesh CA certificate. Furthermore, Envoy uses a certificate chain with the mesh certificate of the workload and the intermediate CA certificate as the client certificate.

The following example workload has no ingress connections and two egress connection to different microservices. The microservices are part of the confidential deployment. One is reachable under billing-svc:8080 and the other under cart-svc:8080.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: web
  annotations:
    contrast.edgeless.systems/servicemesh-egress: "billing#127.137.0.1:8081#billing-svc:8080##cart#127.137.0.2:8081#cart-svc:8080"
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    spec:
      runtimeClassName: contrast-cc
      containers:
        - name: currency-conversion
          image: ghcr.io/edgelesssys/conversion:v1.2.3@...