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href=/v1.9/blog/2021/patch-tuesdays/>Updates to how Istio security releases are handled: Patch Tuesday, embargoes, and 0-days</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn how to use discovery selectors and how they intersect with Sidecar resources (April 30, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/discovery-selectors/>Use discovery selectors to configure namespaces for your Istio service mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Understanding the upcoming changes to Istio networking, how they may impact your cluster, and what action to take (April 15, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/upcoming-networking-changes/>Upcoming networking changes in Istio 1.10</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An update on Envoy and Istio's WebAssembly-based extensibility effort (March 5, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/wasm-progress/>Istio and Envoy WebAssembly Extensibility, One Year On</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A tutorial to help customers migrate from the deprecated v1alpha1 security policy to the supported v1beta1 version (March 3, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/migrate-alpha-policy/>Migrate pre-Istio 1.4 Alpha security policy to the current APIs</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Understanding the benefits Istio brings, even when no configuration is used (February 25, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/zero-config-istio/>Zero Configuration Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn about sessions, panels, workshops and more on the IstioCon website (February 16, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/istiocon-2021-program/>IstioCon 2021: Schedule Is Live!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="AuthorizationPolicy now supports CUSTOM action to delegate the authorization to external system (February 9, 2021)" href=/v1.9/blog/2021/better-external-authz/>Better External Authorization</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card1 title="Blog posts for 2020." aria-controls=card1-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2020 Posts</button><div class="body default" aria-labelledby=card1 role=region id=card1-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card1><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Deploy multiple Istio egress gateways independently to have fine-grained control of egress communication from the mesh (December 16, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/proxying-legacy-services-using-egress-gateways/>Proxying legacy services using Istio egress gateways</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to enable proxy protocol on AWS NLB and Istio ingress gateway (December 11, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/show-source-ip/>Proxy protocol on AWS NLB and Istio ingress gateway</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The inaugural conference for Istio will take place at the end of February (December 8, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/istiocon-2021/>Join us for the first IstioCon in 2021!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to ensure your clusters are not impacted by Docker Hub rate limiting (December 7, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/docker-rate-limit/>Handling Docker Hub rate limiting</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Workload Local DNS resolution to simplify VM integration, multicluster, and more (November 12, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/dns-proxy/>Expanding into New Frontiers - Smart DNS Proxying in Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announcing the four newest Istio Steering Committee members (September 29, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/steering-election-results/>2020 Steering Committee Election Results</a></li><li role=none><span role=treeitem class=current title="The effect of security policies on latency of requests (September 15, 2020)">Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</span></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new deployment model for Istio (August 27, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The Istio Steering Committee is now in part proportionally allocated to companies based on contribution, and in part elected by community members (August 24, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/steering-changes/>Introducing the new Istio steering committee</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An alternative sidecar proxy for Istio (July 28, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/mosn-proxy/>Using MOSN with Istio: an alternative data plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An update on trademarks and project governance (July 8, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/open-usage/>Open and neutral: transferring our trademarks to the Open Usage Commons</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new way to manage installation of telemetry addons (June 4, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/addon-rework/>Reworking our Addon Integrations</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describing the new functionality of Workload Entries (May 21, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/workload-entry/>Introducing Workload Entries</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Simplifying Istio upgrades by offering safe canary deployments of the control plane (May 19, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/multiple-control-planes/>Safely Upgrade Istio using a Canary Control Plane Deployment</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Application Load Balancer to direct traffic to the Istio Ingress gateway with mutual TLS (May 15, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/alb-ingress-gateway-iks/>Direct encrypted traffic from IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Ingress to Istio Ingress Gateway</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Community partner tooling of Wasm for Istio by Solo.io (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/wasmhub-istio/>Extended and Improved WebAssemblyHub to Bring the Power of WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A mechanism to acquire and share an application certificate and key through mounted files (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/proxy-cert/>Provision a certificate and key for an application without sidecars</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istiod consolidates the Istio control plane components into a single binary (March 19, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/istiod/>Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Wasm extensions for Envoy and Istio declaratively (March 16, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The future of Istio extensibility using WASM (March 5, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020 (March 3, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage secrets (February 20, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/istio-agent/>Remove cross-pod unix domain sockets</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automating Istio configuration for Istio deployments (clusters) that work as a single mesh (January 5, 2020)" href=/v1.9/blog/2020/multi-cluster-mesh-automation/>Multicluster Istio configuration and service discovery using Admiral</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card2 title="Blog posts for 2019." aria-controls=card2-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2019 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card2 role=region id=card2-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card2><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provision and manage DNS certificates in Istio (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/dns-cert/>DNS Certificate Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Analyze your Istio configuration to detect potential issues and get general insights (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/introducing-istioctl-analyze/>Introducing istioctl analyze</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction to Istio's new operator-based installation and control plane management feature (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/introducing-istio-operator/>Introducing the Istio Operator</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/v1beta1-authorization-policy/>Introducing the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Getting programmatic access to Istio resources (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/announcing-istio-client-go/>Announcing Istio client-go</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage Istio webhooks (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/webhook/>Secure Webhook Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure Istio ingress gateway to act as a proxy for external services (October 15, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/proxy/>Istio as a Proxy for External Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Deploy environments that require isolation into separate meshes and enable inter-mesh communication by mesh federation (October 2, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/isolated-clusters/>Multi-Mesh Deployments for Isolation and Boundary Protection</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How can you use Istio to monitor blocked and passthrough external traffic (September 28, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/monitoring-external-service-traffic/>Monitoring Blocked and Passthrough External Service Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to secure multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with zero code changes (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/app-identity-and-access-adapter/>App Identity and Access Adapter</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Demonstrates a Mixer out-of-process adapter which implements the Knative scale-from-zero logic (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/knative-activator-adapter/>Mixer Adapter for Knative</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Taking advantage of Kubernetes trustworthy JWTs to issue certificates for workload instances more securely (September 10, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/trustworthy-jwt-sds/>Change in Secret Discovery Service in Istio 1.3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The design principles behind Istio's APIs and how those APIs are evolving (August 5, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/evolving-istios-apis/>The Evolution of Istio's APIs</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Comparison of alternative solutions to control egress traffic including performance considerations (July 22, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-3/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Use Istio Egress Traffic Control to prevent attacks involving egress traffic (July 10, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-2/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 2</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Tools and guidance for evaluating Istio's data plane performance (July 9, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/>Best Practices: Benchmarking Service Mesh Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn how to extend the lifetime of Istio self-signed root certificate (June 7, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/root-transition/>Extending Istio Self-Signed Root Certificate Lifetime</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Attacks involving egress traffic and requirements for egress traffic control (May 22, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-1/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 1</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An overview of Istio 1.1 performance (March 19, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/istio1.1_perf/>Architecting Istio 1.1 for Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Istio route rules in a multicluster service mesh (February 7, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/multicluster-version-routing/>Version Routing in a Multicluster Service Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announces the new Istio blog policy (February 5, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/sail-the-blog/>Sail the Blog!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="De-mystify how Istio manages to plugin its data-plane components into an existing deployment (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/data-plane-setup/>Demystifying Istio's Sidecar Injection Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Verifies the performance impact of adding an egress gateway (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/egress-performance/>Egress Gateway Performance Investigation</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Addressing application startup ordering and startup latency using AppSwitch (January 14, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/appswitch/>Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to deploy a custom ingress gateway using cert-manager manually (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/custom-ingress-gateway/>Deploy a Custom Ingress Gateway Using Cert-Manager</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio has a new discussion board (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.9/blog/2019/announcing-discuss.istio.io/>Announcing discuss.istio.io</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card3 title="Blog posts for 2018." aria-controls=card3-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2018 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card3 role=region id=card3-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card3><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to use Istio for traffic management without deploying sidecar proxies (November 21, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/incremental-traffic-management/>Incremental Istio Part 1, Traffic Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (November 16, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/egress-mongo/>Consuming External MongoDB Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio hosting an all day Twitch stream to celebrate the 1.0 release (August 3, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/istio-twitch-stream/>All Day Istio Twitch Stream</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How HP is building its next-generation footwear personalization platform on Istio (July 31, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/hp/>Istio a Game Changer for HP's FitStation Platform</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automatic application onboarding and latency optimizations using AppSwitch (July 30, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/delayering-istio/>Delayering Istio with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describe Istio's authorization feature and how to use it in various use cases (July 20, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/istio-authorization/>Micro-Segmentation with Istio Authorization</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to export Istio Access Logs to different sinks like BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver (July 9, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/export-logs-through-stackdriver/>Exporting Logs to BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio for monitoring and access policies of HTTP egress traffic (June 22, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/egress-monitoring-access-control/>Monitoring and Access Policies for HTTP Egress Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1alpha3 routing API (April 25, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/v1alpha3-routing/>Introducing the Istio v1alpha3 routing API</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio ingress with a network load balancer on AWS (April 20, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/aws-nlb/>Configuring Istio Ingress with AWS NLB</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Kubernetes namespaces and RBAC to create an Istio soft multi-tenancy environment (April 19, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/soft-multitenancy/>Istio Soft Multi-Tenancy Support</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An introduction to safer, lower-risk deployments and release to production (February 8, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/traffic-mirroring/>Traffic Mirroring with Istio for Testing in Production</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (February 6, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/egress-tcp/>Consuming External TCP Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (January 31, 2018)" href=/v1.9/blog/2018/egress-https/>Consuming External Web Services</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card4 title="Blog posts for 2017." aria-controls=card4-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2017 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card4 role=region id=card4-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card4><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Improving availability and reducing latency (December 7, 2017)" href=/v1.9/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/>Mixer and the SPOF Myth</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture (November 3, 2017)" href=/v1.9/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How Kubernetes Network Policy relates to Istio policy (August 10, 2017)" href=/v1.9/blog/2017/0.1-using-network-policy/>Using Network Policy with Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to create autoscaled canary deployments (June 14, 2017)" href=/v1.9/blog/2017/0.1-canary/>Canary Deployments using Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio Authentication 0.1 announcement (May 25, 2017)" href=/v1.9/blog/2017/0.1-auth/>Using Istio to Improve End-to-End Security</a></li></ul></div></div></div></nav></div><div class=article-container><button tabindex=-1 id=sidebar-toggler title="Toggle the navigation bar"><svg class="icon pull"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#pull"/></svg></button><nav aria-label=Breadcrumb><ol><li><a href=/v1.9/ title="Connect, secure, control, and observe services.">Istio</a></li><li><a href=/v1.9/blog/ title="Posts about using Istio.">Blog</a></li><li><a href=/v1.9/blog/2020/ title="Blog posts for 2020.">2020 Posts</a></li><li>Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</li></ol></nav><article aria-labelledby=title><div class=title-area><div style=width:100%><h1 id=title>Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</h1><p class=subtitle>The effect of security policies on latency of requests</p><p class=byline><span>By</span>
<span class=attribution>Michael Eizaguirre (Google), Yangmin Zhu (Google), Carolyn Hu (Google)</span><span> | </span><span><svg class="icon calendar"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#calendar"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>September 15, 2020</span><span> | </span><span title="887 words"><svg class="icon clock"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#clock"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>5 minute read</span>
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<span></span></p></div></div><nav class=toc-inlined aria-label="Table of Contents"><div><hr><ol><li role=none aria-label=Overview><a href=#overview>Overview</a><li role=none aria-label=Setup><a href=#setup>Setup</a><li role=none aria-label="Test cases"><a href=#test-cases>Test cases</a><li role=none aria-label=Data><a href=#data>Data</a><li role=none aria-label=Conclusion><a href=#conclusion>Conclusion</a><li role=none aria-label="See also"><a href=#see-also>See also</a></li></ol><hr></div></nav><h2 id=overview>Overview</h2><p>Istio has a wide range of security policies which can be easily configured into systems of services. As the number of applied policies increases, it is important to understand the relationship of latency, memory usage, and CPU usage of the system.</p><p>This blog post goes over common security policies use cases and how the number of security policies or the number of specific rules in a security policy can affect the overall latency of requests.</p><h2 id=setup>Setup</h2><p>There are a wide range of security policies and many more combinations of those policies. We will go over 6 of the most commonly used test cases.</p><p>The following test cases are run in an environment which consists of a <a href=https://fortio.org/>Fortio</a> client sending requests to a Fortio server, with a baseline of no Envoy sidecars deployed. The following data was gathered by using the <a href=https://github.com/istio/tools/tree/master/perf/benchmark>Istio performance benchmarking tool</a>.<figure style=width:55%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/istio_setup.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/istio_setup.svg alt="Environment setup"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure></p><p>In these test cases, requests either do not match any rules or match only the very last rule in the security policies. This ensures that the RBAC filter is applied to all policy rules, and never matches a policy rule before before viewing all the policies. Even though this is not necessarily what will happen in your own system, this policy setup provides data for the worst possible performance of each test case.</p><h2 id=test-cases>Test cases</h2><ol><li><p>Mutual TLS STRICT vs plaintext.</p></li><li><p>A single authorization policy with a variable number of principal rules as well as a <code>PeerAuthentication</code> policy. The principal rule is dependent on the <code>PeerAuthentication</code> policy being applied to the system.</p></li><li><p>A single authorization policy with a variable number of <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules as well as a <code>RequestAuthentication</code> policy. The <code>requestPrincipal</code> is dependent on the <code>RequestAuthentication</code> policy being applied to the system.</p></li><li><p>A single authorization policy with a variable number of <code>paths</code> vs <code>sourceIP</code> rules.</p></li><li><p>A variable number of authorization policies consisting of a single path or <code>sourceIP</code> rule.</p></li><li><p>A single <code>RequestAuthentication</code> policy with variable number of <code>JWTRules</code> rules.</p></li></ol><h2 id=data>Data</h2><p>The y-axis of each test is the latency in milliseconds, and the x-axis is the number of concurrent connections. The x-axis of each graph consists of 3 data points that represent a small load (qps=100, conn=8), medium load (qps=500, conn=32), and large load (qps=1000, conn=64).</p><div id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1 role=tablist class=tabset><div class=tab-strip data-category-name=platform><button aria-selected=true data-category-value=one aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-0-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-0-tab role=tab><span>MTLS vs plainText</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=two aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-1-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-1-tab role=tab><span>AuthZ mTLS SourcePrincipals</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=three aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-2-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-2-tab role=tab><span>AuthZ JWT RequestPrincipal</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=four aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-3-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-3-tab role=tab><span>AuthZ sourceIP</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=five aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-4-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-4-tab role=tab><span>AuthZ paths</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=six aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-5-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-5-tab role=tab><span>RequestAuthN JWT Issuer</span>
</button><button tabindex=-1 data-category-value=seven aria-controls=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-6-panel id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-6-tab role=tab><span>Variable AuthZ</span></button></div><div class=tab-content><div id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-0-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-0-tab><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/mtls_plaintext.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/mtls_plaintext.svg alt="MTLS vs plaintext"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The difference of latency between MTLS mode STRICT and plaintext is very small in lower loads. As the <code>qps</code> and <code>conn</code> increase, the latency of requests with MTLS STRICT increases. The additional latency increased in larger loads is minimal compared to that of the increase from having no sidecars to having sidecars in the plaintext.</div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-1-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-1-tab><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_principals.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_principals.svg alt="Authorization policy variable number of principals"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure><p>For Authorization policies with 10 vs 1000 principal rules, the latency increase of 10 principal rules compared to no policies is greater than the latency increase of 1000 principals compared to 10 principals.</div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-2-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-2-tab><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_requestPrincipals.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_requestPrincipals.svg alt="Authorization policy with variable principals"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>For Authorization policies with a variable number of <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules, the latency increase of 10 <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules compared to no policies is nearly the same as the latency increase of 1000 <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules compared to 10 <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules.</div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-3-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-3-tab><p><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_sourceIP.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_sourceIP.svg alt="Authorization policy with variable `sourceIP` rules"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The latency increase of a single <code>AuthZ</code> policy with 10 <code>sourceIP</code> rules is not proportional to the latency increase of a single <code>AuthZ</code> policy with 1000 <code>sourceIP</code> rules compared to the system with sidecar and no policies.</p><p><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_paths_vs_sourceIP.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_paths_vs_sourceIP.svg alt="Authorization policy with both paths and `sourceIP`"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The latency increase of a variable number of <code>sourceIP</code> rules is marginally greater than that of path rules.</p></div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-4-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-4-tab><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_paths.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_paths.svg alt="Authorization policy with variable number of paths"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The latency increase of a single <code>AuthZ</code> policy with 10 path rules is not proportional to the latency increase of a single <code>AuthZ</code> policy with 1000 path rules compared to the system with sidecar and no policies. This trend is similar to that of <code>sourceIP</code> rules.<figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_paths_vs_sourceIP.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_paths_vs_sourceIP.svg alt="Authorization policy with both paths and `sourceIP`"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The latency of a variable number of paths rules is marginally lesser than that of <code>sourceIP</code> rules.</div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-5-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-5-tab><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/RequestAuthN_jwks.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/RequestAuthN_jwks.svg alt="Request Authentication with variable number of JWT issuers"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The latency of a single JWT issuer is comparable to that of no policies, but as the number of JWT issuers increase, the latency increases disproportionately.</div><div hidden id=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-6-panel role=tabpanel tabindex=0 aria-labelledby=tabset-blog-2020-large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests-1-6-tab><p>To test how the number of Authorization policies affect runtime, the tests can be broken into two cases:</p><ol><li><p>Every Authorization policy has a single <code>sourceIP</code> rule.</p></li><li><p>Every Authorization policy has a single path rule.</p></li></ol><p><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_policies_sourceIP.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_policies_sourceIP.svg alt="Authorization policy with variable number of policies, with `sourceIP` rule"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure><figure style=width:90%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:45.34%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_policies_paths.svg><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.9/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/AuthZ_var_policies_paths.svg alt="Authorization policy with variable number of policies, with path rule"></a></div><figcaption></figcaption></figure>The overall trends of both graphs are similar. This is consistent to the paths vs <code>sourceIP</code> data, which showed that the latency is marginally greater for <code>sourceIP</code> rules than that of path rules.</p></div></div></div><h2 id=conclusion>Conclusion</h2><ul><li><p>In general, adding security policies does not add relatively high overhead to the system. The policies that add the most latency include:</p><ol><li><p>Authorization policy with <code>JWTRules</code> rules.</p></li><li><p>Authorization policy with <code>requestPrincipal</code> rules.</p></li><li><p>Authorization policy with principals rules.</p></li></ol></li><li><p>In lower loads (requests with lower qps and conn) the difference in latency for most policies is minimal.</p></li><li><p>Envoy proxy sidecars increase latency more than most policies, even if the policies are large.</p></li><li><p>The latency increase of extremely large policies is relatively similar to the latency increase of adding Envoy proxy sidecars compared to that of no sidecars.</p></li><li><p>Two different tests determined that the <code>sourceIP</code> rule is marginally slower than a path rule.</p></li></ul><p>If you are interested in creating your own large scale security policies and running performance tests with them, see the <a href=https://github.com/istio/tools/tree/master/perf/benchmark/security/generate_policies>performance benchmarking tool README</a>.</p><p>If you are interested in reading more about the security policies tests, see <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZP9eQ_2EJEG12xnfsoo7125FDN38r62iqY1PUn9Dz-0/edit?usp=sharing">our design doc</a>. If you don&rsquo;t already have access, you can <a href=/v1.9/about/community/join/>join the Istio team drive</a>.</p><nav id=see-also><h2>See also</h2><div class=see-also><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/wasmhub-istio/>Extended and Improved WebAssemblyHub to Bring the Power of WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></p><p class=desc>Community partner tooling of Wasm for Istio by Solo.io.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></p><p class=desc>The future of Istio extensibility using WASM.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></p><p class=desc>A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/>Best Practices: Benchmarking Service Mesh Performance</a></p><p class=desc>Tools and guidance for evaluating Istio's data plane performance.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2019/istio1.1_perf/>Architecting Istio 1.1 for Performance</a></p><p class=desc>An overview of Istio 1.1 performance.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.9/blog/2019/egress-performance/>Egress Gateway Performance Investigation</a></p><p class=desc>Verifies the performance impact of adding an egress gateway.</p></div></div></nav></article><nav class=pagenav><div class=left><a title="Announcing the four newest Istio Steering Committee members." href=/v1.9/blog/2020/steering-election-results/><svg class="icon left-arrow"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#left-arrow"/></svg>2020 Steering Committee Election Results</a></div><div class=right><a title="A new deployment model for Istio." href=/v1.9/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh<svg class="icon right-arrow"><use xlink:href="/v1.9/img/icons.svg#right-arrow"/></svg></a></div></nav><div id=feedback><div id=feedback-initial>Was this information useful?<br><button class="btn feedback" onclick="sendFeedback('en',1)">Yes</button>
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