Deep Dive: SPIFFE

SPIFFE (Secure Production Infrastructure for Everyone) and SPIRE are two of the newer projects to join the CNCF. These projects build on designs first championed at Google, Twitter and elsewhere to pr …

SPIFFE (Secure Production Infrastructure for Everyone) and SPIRE are two of the newer projects to join the CNCF. These projects build on designs first championed at Google, Twitter and elsewhere to provide robust authentication and trust between disparate micro-services in heterogeneous operating environments.This talk will expand on concepts introduced during the SPIFFE 101 session to explore in detail how SPIRE performs attestation to workloads in diverse infrastructure and middleware settings, how it leans on different secrets storage backends and how PKI material is automatically delivered to a node and workload. The talk also will cover how these capabilities can be extended and customized through SPIRE’s plugin framework.In this session, we will demo two (2) things, specifically:1) How SPIFFE can be used to secure communication between two workloads running on different Kubernetes clusters running on different clouds. For a twist, we’ll demo this for both direct connections as well as those going through load balancers.2) How to federate SPIRE deployments in different trust domains. This demo will also showcase how we federate JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to facilitate cross-cloud communication.