The Top 10 List of Istio Security Risks and Mitigation Strategies

This talk presents the first-ever Top 10 list of security risks facing Istio deployments, a community-driven effort drawing on the expertise of security professionals and cloud-native computing experts. The list aims to help organizations prioritize their security efforts by highlighting the most significant risks in cloud-native applications. The presentation covers the risks included in the list, the selection criteria, and actionable strategies for mitigating these critical security risks in cloud-native computing. It delves into various security aspects such as insecure communication, unsafe authorization patterns, weak service account authorization, broken object-level authorization, supply chain vulnerabilities, limitations in ingress and egress traffic capture, security observability and monitoring failures, and vulnerable Istio versions. The talk emphasizes that most security risks are related to configuration mistakes and that a multi-layered approach is essential for securing systems, assuming an attacker is already inside the network.