Overview
Learn about using Solo distributions of Istio, a hardened Istio enterprise image to maintain n-4
support.
About Solo distributions of Istio
The Solo distribution of Istio is a hardened Istio enterprise image, which maintains n-4
support for CVEs and other security fixes. The image support timeline is longer than the community Istio support timeline, which provides n-1
support with an additional 6 weeks of extended time to upgrade the n-2
version to n-1
. Based on a cadence of 1 release every 3 months, Gloo Mesh Core’s n-4 support provides an extra 9 months to run the hardened Istio version of your choice, compared to an open source strategy that also lacks enterprise support. Note that all backported functionality is available in the upstream community Istio, as there are no forked capabilities from community Istio.
The following image provides an overview of how Solo engineers harden the base Istio image release.
To use a version of Istio that is no longer supported by the community with Gloo Mesh Core, you must install the Solo distribution of Istio. If the Istio version that you want to use is currently supported by the community, you can use either the community Istio or the Solo distribution of Istio. To review supported Solo distributions of Istio, see the versions table. To review supported community versions, see the Istio documentation.
Distributions
Solo provides two main distributions of Istio as follows.
- Standard: An enterprise distribution of the community Istio project with additional security patches. Example:
1.22.4
- Solo: An enterprise distribution of the community Istio project with additional security patches, as well as certain Envoy filters to enable Gloo Mesh Core features, such as support for deploying Istio service meshes in ambient mode. You must use the
solo
image to use these features. Example:1.22.4-solo
Both Solo’s standard
and solo
distributions of Istio come in the following optional varieties.
- FIPS: An image that is tagged with
fips
complies with NIST FIPS, for use cases that require federal information processing capabilities. Examples:1.22.4-fips
,1.22.4-solo-fips
- Distroless: An image that is tagged with
distroless
is a slimmed down distribution with the minimum set of binary dependencies to run the image, for enhanced performance and security. Note that if your app relies on package management, shell, or other operating system tools such aspip
,apt
,ls
,grep
, orbash
, you must find another way to install these dependencies. Examples:1.22.4-distroless
,1.22.4-solo-distroless
- ARM: An image that is tagged with
arm
is compatible with ARM64 architectures. Support for ARM images varies with your Istio version and distribution.- 1.16.0 and later: Both the standard and Solo distributions of Istio are now multi-architecture Docker images, which work for both AMD and ARM architectures. The
-arm
tag is no longer needed or supported. For example,1.22.4-solo
,1.22.4-fips
, and1.22.4-solo-fips
work for both AMD and ARM. - 1.15.3 and later 1.15 versions: ARM images (tagged with
-arm
) are supported for the standard distribution with FIPS and the Solo distribution without FIPS. For example,1.15.3-fips-arm
and1.15.3-solo-arm
are supported, but1.15.3-solo-fips-arm
and1.15.3-arm
are not supported. - 1.15.0 - 1.15.2: ARM images are not supported for either distribution of these versions.
- 1.16.0 and later: Both the standard and Solo distributions of Istio are now multi-architecture Docker images, which work for both AMD and ARM architectures. The
An image might be tagged to meet multiple use cases, such as 1.22.4-solo-fips-distroless
.
To use Solo distributions of Istio, you must use a repo key for the Solo distribution of Istio that you can get by logging in to the Support Center and reviewing the Istio images built by Solo support article.
About Solo FIPS distribution of Istio
For use cases that require federal information processing capabilities, install Solo distributions of Istio that are tagged with fips
, which comply with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS).
For example, you might provide a cloud service that runs in a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) regulated environment. In such cases, Gloo Mesh offers FIPS builds of community Istio without the need for any additional tooling or CLIs. You can use the upstream-native Istio tooling, such istioctl
or Istio Helm charts, to install Solo’s FIPS builds of Istio.
Standard and Solo FIPS builds
Solo provides two main distributions of Istio, which both offer FIPS-compliant builds:
- Standard: An enterprise distribution of the community Istio project with additional security patches.
- Solo: An enterprise distribution of the community Istio project with additional security patches, as well as certain Envoy filters to enable Gloo Mesh Core features.
Depending on the distribution, the image tag for installation might look like 1.22.4-solo-fips
.
For FIPS-compliant Solo distributions of Istio 1.17.2 and 1.16.4, you must use the -patch1
versions of the latest Istio builds published by Solo, such as 1.17.2-patch1-solo-fips
for Solo distribution of Istio 1.17. These patch versions fix a FIPS-related issue introduced in the upstream Envoy code. In 1.17.3 and later, FIPS compliance is available in the -fips
tags of regular Solo distributions of Istio, such as 1.17.3-solo-fips
.
Optional: Distroless FIPS builds
In addition, you can also choose a FIPS build that is distroless. A FIPS image that is tagged with distroless
is a slimmed down distribution with the minimum set of binary dependencies to run the image, for enhanced performance and security. Keep in mind that there are some challenges around distroless builds; for example, if your app relies on package management, shell, or other operating system tools such as pip
, apt
, ls
, grep
, or bash
, you must find another way to install these dependencies.
Depending on the distribution, the image tag for a distroless installation might look like 1.22.4-solo-fips-distroless
.
Installing a FIPS build
To find the FIPS build that you want, see Download a specific Solo distribution of Istio. You can then use the image to install Istio in one of the following ways.
- To use Gloo Mesh Core to deploy and manage the lifecycle of your Istio service meshes across clusters, see Deploy Gloo-managed service meshes. In the example files that you download in this guide, make sure to replace any images with a Solo FIPS distribution of Istio-tagged image.
- To manually install Istio, you can use an installation method such as using
istioctl
, the Istio Operator, or Helm. When you install Istio, make sure to replace any images with a Solo FIPS distribution of Istio-tagged image. For more information, see the Istio documentation.
Verifying FIPS compliance
For most auditors, both the Istio control plane and the service mesh data plane in each workload cluster must be FIPS compliant. You can verify that your images are a FIPS-compliant version by checking Envoy and istiod on each cluster.
To verify the Istio data plane in each workload cluster, check the Envoy proxy version.
kubectl exec -it -n istio-system deploy/istio-ingressgateway -- /usr/local/bin/envoy --version
Example output of FIPS compliance:
/usr/local/bin/envoy version: fa9fd362c488508a661d2ffa66e66976bb9104c3/1.15.1/Clean/RELEASE/BoringSSL-FIPS
To verify the Istio control plane components in each workload cluster, copy the
pilot-discovery
binary out of the istiod container, and rungoversion
against the binary.Install
goversion
to your local machine.go get github.com/rsc/goversion
Copy the binary out to the local disk.
kubectl cp istio-system/<pod-name>:/usr/local/bin/pilot-discovery /tmp/pilot-discovery && chmod +x /tmp/pilot-discovery
Run
goversion
against the binary.goversion -crypto /tmp/pilot-discovery
Example output of FIPS compliance: Note that the type is indicated as boring and the version number includes a b.
/tmp/pilot-discovery go1.14.12b4 (boring crypto)
Example output of FIPS non-compliance: Note that the type is indicated as standard, which means that the image in not a FIPS build of Istio.
/tmp/pilot-discovery go1.14.14 (standard crypto)