Cilium is open source software for transparently securing the network connectivity between application services deployed using Linux container management platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. It is a CNI plugin that offers layer 7 features typically seen with a service mesh. On this week’s podcast, Thomas Graf (one of the maintainers of Cilium and co-founder of Isovalent) discusses the recent 1.6 release, some of the security questions/concerns around eBPF, and the future roadmap for the project.

Why listen to this podcast:

* Cilium brings eBPF to the Cloud Native World. It works across both layer 4 and a layer 7. While it started as a pure eBPF plugin, they discovered that just caring about ports was not enough from a security perspective.

* Cilium went 1.0 about a year and a half ago. 1.6 is the most featured-packed release of Cilium yet. Today, it has around 100 contributors.

* While Cilium can make it much easier to manage IPTables, Cilium overlaps with a service mesh in that it can do things like understand application protocols, HTTP routes, or even restrict access to specific tables in data stores.

* Cilium provides both in kernel and sidecar deployments. For sidecar deployments, it can work with Envoy to switch between kernel space and userspace code. The focus is on flexibility, performance, and low overhead.

* BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) was initial designed to do filtering on data links. eBPF has the same roots but it’s now used for system call filtering, tracing, sandbox, etc. It’s grown to be a general-purpose programming language to extend the Linux kernel.

* Cilium has a multi-cluster feature built-in. The 1.6 release can run in a kube-proxy free configuration. It allows fine-grain network policies to run across multiple clusters without the use of IPTables.

* Cilium offers on-the-wire encryption using in-kernel encryption technology that enables mTLS across all traffic in your service fleet. The encryption is completely transparent to the application.

* eBPF has been used in all production environments at Facebook since May 2017. It’s been used at places like Netflix, Google, and Reddit. There are a lot of companies who have an interest in eBPF being secure and production-ready, so there’s a lot of attention focused on fixing and resolving and security issues that arise.

* 1.6 also released KVstore-free operation, socket-based load balancing, CNI chaining, Native AWS ENI mode, enhancements to transparent encryption, and more.

* The plans for 1.17 is to keep raising up the stack into the socket level (to offer things like load balancing and transparent encryption at scale) and likely offering deeper security features such as process-aware security policies for internal pod traffic.

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