On Improved Efficiency of Zero-Trust Tunnel for Inter-Microservices Communication

After trading the hardware cost and deployment complexity of inter-microservice communication architecture, the data plane of service mesh has gradually changed from sidecar mode to sidecarless mode. In sidecarless mode, the traffic of microservices need to be processed by zero-trust tunnel, so that the confidentiality, integrity and authentication of application data can be achieved. Thus, the efficiency of zero trust tunnel has a great impact on the performance of inter-microservices communication. However, current zero trust tunnel schemes require additional data transmission and processing, resulting in serious performance degradation. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient zero-trust tunnel which is called EZTunnel. Based on a programmable kernel, EZTunnel can execute L4 traffic management and security policies during system calls, thereby improving the communication performance between microservices. Through experiments under different traffic characteristic, we show that EZTunnel can achieve better inter-microservice request response delay, flow completion time and communication bandwidth than current zero-trust tunnel.