Achieving Zero Trust Security on Amazon EKS with Istio

This article discusses how to achieve zero trust security on Amazon EKS using Istio, a powerful service mesh. It covers implementing various security features like mutual TLS (mTLS) for peer authentication, request authentication with JSON Web Tokens (JWT), ingress gateway certificate management with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and external authorization with Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Specifically, the article covers:

• Peer authentication using mTLS to encrypt and authenticate service-to-service communication within the mesh
• Request authentication by validating JWTs from an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider like Keycloak
• Ingress gateway certificate management using ACM to simplify managing and renewing certificates
• OPA external authorization to enforce fine-grained access control policies across the Istio service mesh
• A comprehensive GitHub code sample demonstrating the setup and implementation of these security features