Advanced Traffic Management Security

Advanced Traffic Management Security

Service meshes provide sophisticated traffic management capabilities with security implications. Circuit breaking prevents cascading failures by limiting connections to struggling services. Retry policies with exponential backoff prevent denial-of-service through retry storms. These resilience features also provide security benefits by limiting attack amplification.

Traffic shifting enables advanced deployment patterns with security benefits. Canary deployments route small percentages of traffic to new versions, limiting exposure if vulnerabilities exist. Blue-green deployments enable instant rollback if security issues are discovered. Shadow traffic duplicates requests to test environments without affecting production, enabling security testing with real traffic patterns.

# Linkerd traffic split with security policies
apiVersion: split.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1
kind: TrafficSplit
metadata:
  name: api-canary
  namespace: production
spec:
  service: api-service
  backends:
  - service: api-stable
    weight: 90
  - service: api-canary
    weight: 10

---
# Linkerd service profile with security features
apiVersion: linkerd.io/v1alpha2
kind: ServiceProfile
metadata:
  name: api-service.production.svc.cluster.local
  namespace: production
spec:
  routes:
  - name: health_check
    condition:
      method: GET
      pathRegex: "/health"
    responseClasses:
    - condition:
        status:
          min: 200
          max: 299
      isFailure: false
    timeout: 30s
    
  - name: api_endpoints
    condition:
      method: POST
      pathRegex: "/api/v1/.*"
    responseClasses:
    - condition:
        status:
          min: 500
          max: 599
      isFailure: true
    timeout: 10s
    retryBudget:
      retryRatio: 0.2
      minRetriesPerSecond: 10
      ttl: 10s

  # Global retry budget to prevent retry amplification attacks
  retryBudget:
    retryRatio: 0.1
    minRetriesPerSecond: 5
    ttl: 10s

---
# Consul Connect intentions for security
Kind: service-intentions
apiVersion: consul.hashicorp.com/v1alpha1
metadata:
  name: api-intentions
  namespace: production
spec:
  destination:
    name: api-service
  sources:
  - name: frontend
    namespace: production
    action: allow
    permissions:
    - action: allow
      http:
        pathPrefix: /api/v1/public
        methods: ["GET", "POST"]
    - action: allow
      http:
        pathExact: /api/v1/user
        methods: ["GET"]
        header:
        - name: "Authorization"
          present: true
  - name: admin-service
    namespace: production
    action: allow
  - name: "*"
    namespace: "*"
    action: deny

Rate limiting and quota management prevent resource exhaustion attacks. Service meshes can enforce limits based on various attributes including source identity, destination service, or custom headers. Distributed rate limiting ensures consistent enforcement across all instances while adaptive limiting adjusts based on service health.