SPIRE: Toolchain of APIs for establishing trust between software systems
SPIRE is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It’s a production-ready implementation of the SPIFFE APIs that handles node and workload attestation to securely issue SVIDs to workloads and verify the SVIDs of other workloads, all based on a predefined set of conditions.
SPIRE architecture and components
Common use cases include securing service-to-service communication in microservices architectures, enabling zero trust networking, and supporting secure multi-cloud or hybrid cloud deployments.
Organizations also use SPIRE to enforce least privilege access across containerized workloads, streamline workload authentication without relying on long-lived secrets, and improve the auditability of service interactions. Its ability to work across a wide variety of platforms makes it especially useful in complex, heterogeneous infrastructure.
A SPIRE deployment consists of a SPIRE Server and one or more SPIRE Agents. The server acts as the signing authority for identities issued to workloads through the agents. It also manages a registry of workload identities and the conditions required for their issuance. Agents, which must be installed on each node running a workload, expose the SPIFFE Workload API locally to those workloads.
You can also create custom server and agent plugins for particular platforms and architectures for which SPIRE doesn’t include plugins.
SPIRE is available for free on GitHub. To learn more about it, you can also download a free PDF of the Solving the Bottom Turtle.
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