Testing Istio mutual TLS authentication

Through this task, you will learn how to:

Verify the Istio mutual TLS Authentication setup
Manually test the authentication

Before you begin

This task assumes you have a Kubernetes cluster:

Installed Istio with mutual TLS authentication by following the Istio installation task. Note to choose “enable Istio mutual TLS Authentication feature” at step 5 in “Installation steps”.

Verifying Istio’s mutual TLS authentication setup

The following commands assume the services are deployed in the default namespace. Use the parameter -n yournamespace to specify a namespace other than the default one.

Verifying Istio CA

Verify the cluster-level CA is running:

kubectl get deploy -l istio=istio-ca -n istio-system

NAME       DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
istio-ca   1         1         1            1           1m

Istio CA is up if the “AVAILABLE” column is 1.

Verifying service configuration

Verify AuthPolicy setting in ConfigMap.
```
kubectl get configmap istio -o yaml -n istio-system | grep authPolicy | head -1
```
Istio mutual TLS authentication is enabled if the line authPolicy: MUTUAL_TLS is uncommented (doesn’t have a #).

Testing the authentication setup

When running Istio with mutual TLS authentication turned on, you can use curl in one service’s envoy to send request to other services. For example, after starting the BookInfo sample application you can ssh into the envoy container of productpage service, and send request to other services by curl.

There are several steps:

get the productpage pod name

kubectl get pods -l app=productpage

NAME                              READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
productpage-v1-4184313719-5mxjc   2/2       Running   0          23h

Make sure the pod is “Running”.

ssh into the envoy container

kubectl exec -it productpage-v1-4184313719-5mxjc -c istio-proxy /bin/bash

make sure the key/cert is in /etc/certs/ directory
```
ls /etc/certs/ 
```
```
cert-chain.pem   key.pem   root-cert.pem
```
Note that cert-chain.pem is envoy’s cert that needs to present to the other side. key.pem is envoy’s private key paired with cert-chain.pem. root-cert.pem is the root cert to verify the other side’s cert. Currently we only have one CA, so all envoys have the same root-cert.pem.

send requests to another service, for example, details.

curl https://details:9080/details/0 -v --key /etc/certs/key.pem --cert /etc/certs/cert-chain.pem --cacert /etc/certs/root-cert.pem -k

...
error fetching CN from cert:The requested data were not available.
...
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< content-length: 1867
< server: envoy
< date: Thu, 11 May 2017 18:59:42 GMT
< x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 2
...

The service name and port are defined here.

Note that Istio uses Kubernetes service account as service identity, which offers stronger security than service name (refer here for more information). Thus the certificates used in Istio do not have service name, which is the information that curl needs to verify server identity. As a result, we use curl option ‘-k’ to prevent the curl client from aborting when failing to find and verify the server name (i.e., productpage.ns.svc.cluster.local) in the certificate provided by the server.

Please check secure naming here for more information about how the client verifies the server’s identity in Istio.

What we are demonstrating and verifying above is that the server accepts the connection from the client. Try not giving the client --key and --cert and observe you are not allowed to connect and you do not get an HTTP 200.

What’s next

Learn more about the design principles behind Istio’s automatic mTLS authentication between all services in this blog.