Configuring a Security Policy

Procedure

1. Log in to the ASM console and click the name of the target service mesh to go to its details page.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Service Management. In the upper right corner of the list, select the namespace that your services belong to.
3. Locate the target service and click Security in the Operation column. In the window that slides out from the right, configure access authorization and peer authentication.

   Access Authorization

   Access authorization controls the access to services in the mesh and determines whether a request can be sent to the current service.

   On the Access Authorization tab, click Configure now. In the displayed dialog box, click to select one or more services in a specified namespace.

   Peer Authentication

   Istio enables communication between service pods using the Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) tunnel between clients and servers. Peer authentication defines how traffic reaches the current service pod through the tunnel (or not through the tunnel). By default, service pods that have sidecars injected communicate with each other through tunnels. Traffic is automatically encrypted using TLS.

   On the Peer Authentication tab, click Configure now. In the displayed dialog box, select an authentication policy.

   Table 1 Authentication policies

   Parameter	Description
   UNSET	If a peer authentication policy is configured for the parent scope, the service inherits the policy.
   PERMISSIVE	Traffic can be transmitted without passing through the tunnel. Workloads accept both mutual TLS and plain text traffic. By default, the mesh is configured with a peer authentication policy in PERMISSIVE mode.
   STRICT	Traffic is transmitted only through the tunnel because the request must be encrypted using TLS and must contain the client certificate.

   JWT Authentication

   You can configure JWT authentication on ASM. With JWT, ASM authenticates whether the access token in a request header is trusted and authorize the valid user requests.

   

   JWT authentication can be configured only for HTTP services.

   On the JWT Authentication tab, click Configure now. In the displayed dialog box, set the following parameters:

   • Issuer: issuer of the JWT
   • Audiences: audiences who use the JWT token to access the service. Separate audiences by commas (,). A null value indicates that the service can be accessed by any audiences.
   • JWKS: JWT rule set

   For details about the principles and application examples of JWT authentication, see JWT Authentication Principles and Authenticating JWT Requests on the Ingress Gateway Using ASM.