Mazu: A Zero Trust Architecture for Service Mesh Control Planes
Aashutosh Poudel, Pankaj Niroula, Collin MacDonald, Lily Gloudemans, Stephen Herwig · 2025
Microservices are a dominant cloud computing architecture because they enable applications to be built as collections of loosely coupled services. To provide greater observability and control into the resultant distributed system, microservices often use an overlay proxy network called a service mesh. A key advantage of service meshes is their ability to implement zero trust networking by encrypting microservice traffic with mutually authenticated TLS. However, the service mesh control plane---particularly its local certificate authority---becomes a critical point of trust. If compromised, an attacker can issue unauthorized certificates and redirect traffic to impersonating services.