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From Trust Anchors to SPIFFE IDs: Understanding Linkerd’s Automated Identity Pipeline
- Linkerd enables mTLS for TCP traffic among meshed pods by utilizing Root Trust Anchor and Identity Intermediate Issuer certificates.
- The Root Trust Anchor acts as the ultimate trust point and signs intermediate CA certificates, ensuring mesh-wide trust without exposing the root key.
- Linkerd's Root Trust Anchor certificate is stored in a ConfigMap, providing the public key for all intermediates and end-entity certificates.
- New Linkerd proxies receive the Root Trust Anchor certificate during injection, helping bootstrap trust and secure communication.
- The proxy initializes by loading the trust-anchor certificate, generating a key pair, creating a CSR with the proxy's identity, and starting the Rust identity client.
- The identity client obtains the ServiceAccount JWT, Root Trust Anchor cert, private key, and CSR to issue a unique Leaf Certificate for the proxy's SPIFFE ID.
- The Identity Intermediate Issuer Certificate, located in the linkerd-identity-issuer secret, validates ServiceAccount tokens and issues certificates with SPIFFE URIs.
- The Identity service constructs x509.Certificate templates based on the CSR, signs certificates, and returns them to the proxy for mTLS.
- The proxy consumes the received certificate for mTLS, automatically renewing it when necessary by generating new CSRs for rotation.
- The flow involves trust anchor setup, certificate generation, proxy identity validation, and automated rotation to maintain secure communication within the Linkerd service mesh.
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