Date Published: July 19, 2024
Comments Due:
Email Questions to:
Author(s)
Ramaswamy Chandramouli (NIST), Zack Butcher (Tetrate), James Callaghan (control-plane.io)
Announcement
The service mesh has become the de facto application services infrastructure for cloud-native applications. It enables an application’s runtime functions (e.g., network connectivity, access control, etc.) through proxies that form the data plane of the service mesh. Different proxy models or data plane architectures have emerged, depending on the distribution of the network layer functions (i.e., L4 and L7) and the granularity of association of the proxies to individual services/computing nodes.
The purposes of this document are two-fold:
- Develop a threat profile for each of the data plane architectures by considering a set of potential threats to various proxy functions and assign scores to the impacts and likelihoods of their exploits.
- Analyze the service mesh capabilities that are required for each class of cloud-native applications with different risk profiles (i.e., low, medium, and high) and provide recommendations for the data plane architectures or proxy models that are appropriate and applicable for each class.
The service mesh has become the de-facto application services infrastructure for cloud-native applications. It enables the various runtime functions (network connectivity, access control etc.) of an application through proxies which thus form the data plane of the service mesh. Depending upon the distribution of the network layer functions (L4 & L7) and the granularity of association of the proxies to individual services/computing nodes, different proxy models or data plane architectures have emerged. The purpose of this document is to develop a threat profile for each of the data plane architectures through a detailed threat analysis in order to make recommendations for their applicability (usage) for cloud-native applications with different security risk profiles.
The service mesh has become the de-facto application services infrastructure for cloud-native applications. It enables the various runtime functions (network connectivity, access control etc.) of an application through proxies which thus form the data plane of the service mesh. Depending upon the...
See full abstract
The service mesh has become the de-facto application services infrastructure for cloud-native applications. It enables the various runtime functions (network connectivity, access control etc.) of an application through proxies which thus form the data plane of the service mesh. Depending upon the distribution of the network layer functions (L4 & L7) and the granularity of association of the proxies to individual services/computing nodes, different proxy models or data plane architectures have emerged. The purpose of this document is to develop a threat profile for each of the data plane architectures through a detailed threat analysis in order to make recommendations for their applicability (usage) for cloud-native applications with different security risk profiles.
Hide full abstract
Keywords
proxy model; data plane architecture; service mesh; threat profile; cloud-native application
Control Families
None selected