Tech Recipe Book
My Services
  • Book
    • About the author
    • Architect
      • Algorithms
        • DB index algorithms
          • How does database indexing work
        • Neural network optimization
          • Neural Network Optimization
        • Route search
          • Road network in a database to build a route
          • Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)
      • Architecture Frameworks
        • DODAF
        • TOGAF
        • Enterprise Architecture (EA) Tools Reviews 2023 | Gartner
      • Zero Trust
      • Billing
        • SHM billing system
      • Bots
        • Discord
        • Telegram
          • Chat GPT Telegram bot
          • Получаем статистику Telegram-канала при помощи api и python или свой tgstat с регистрацией и смс
          • Как хостить телеграм-бота (и другие скрипты на Python) на Repl.it бесплатно 24/7
          • Создание Telegram бота на PHP #1: основные понятия для работы с API
          • Создание Telegram бота на PHP #2: создание первого бота для Telegram
          • Создание Telegram бота на PHP #3: примеры отправки сообщений с кнопками в Telegram
          • Создание Telegram бота на PHP #4: отправка файлов и изображений в Telegram
          • Создание Telegram бота на PHP #5: работа с хуками
      • Business intelligence
      • Cloud Storage
        • Ceph
        • Virtual Distributed File System
      • Cryptography
        • Open Source PKI Software
        • OpenPGP
          • Email Encryption
          • Kleopatra
          • Miscellaneous Tools
          • Server side applications
      • Message broker
        • Kafka
          • Kafka UI-tools
          • Kafka streams ksqlDb
        • RabbitMQ
      • DB
        • MySQL
          • Auto sharding
          • MariaDB Zabbix monitoring
          • MySQL and MariaDB replication with Zabbix monitoring
        • Postgres
          • HA PostgreSQL with Patroni, Haproxy, Keepalived
          • Mass parallel requests - Greenplum
          • PostgreSQL cluster for development and testing
        • Vitess - Scalable. Reliable. MySQL-compatible. Cloud-native. Database.
      • Identity and Access Management (IDM)
        • FreeIPA - Identity, Policy, Audit
        • FreeIPA as an Enterprise solution
        • Keycloak
          • Keycloak HA cluster
        • Open Identity Platform
        • SSO
          • Keycloak for Java app
          • OpenAM
          • OpenIG
      • Firewall
        • nftables
      • Infrastructure As a Code
        • Ansible
        • IaC Packer Ansible Teraform
        • Installing Jenkins using terraform in Kubernetes in Yandex Cloud with letsencypt
        • Teraform Crosplan Pulumi
        • Yandex IaC solutions
      • Kubernetes
        • Installation
          • Install Kubernetes cluster
          • Deploying a Kubespray cluster to OpenStack using Terraform
          • Kube deploy in Yandex cloud
        • Frameworks
          • Deckhouse
            • LDAP authentification
            • On premise Install
            • Yandex Cloud Install
          • K3S
          • OpenShift OKD
          • RKE2
          • Rancher
            • Rancher Install
        • Auth
          • Keycloak in k8s
          • LDAP
        • GUI management Lens
        • Monitoring
          • Monitoring with Falco
          • Network monitoring
          • Nginx ingress
          • Prometheus Graphana for sample Nodejs app
          • Rsource monitoring Avito
        • Exposing services
          • Exposing Kubernetes Services
          • Cilium BGP
        • CNCF
        • Helm
          • Repositories
            • Artifact Hub | official
            • Bitnami | vmware
          • Awesome helm charts and resources
          • Essential Services for Modern Organizations
          • Security and Compliance
          • Additional charts
        • Isolation
          • vcluster - Virtual Kubernetes Clusters
          • Kiosk
          • KubeArmor
          • Control Plane Hardening
          • Hierarchical namespaces
        • Security Center
          • Minesweeper
          • NeuVector by SUSE
          • SOAR in Kubernetes
          • Security Сenter for Kubernetes
        • Terraform CI security
          • Terraform plan analysis with Checkov and Bridgecrew
          • Yandex Terraform scan
        • Vulnerability management
          • Aqua
          • Sysdig
          • Kyverno
          • GitLab
          • NeuVector by SUSE
        • Image scanning
          • Snyk
          • Sysdig
          • Harbor
          • Trivy
        • Signature verification
          • Sigstore
        • Control plane security
          • Gatekeeper
            • Applying OPA Gatekeeper
          • Kyverno
            • Policy as a code. Kyverno
        • Runtime Security
          • Osquery
          • Falco
          • ClamAV
        • Network security
          • Cilium
          • Control Plane Hardening (API restriction)
          • Network policy recipes
          • Service mesh
            • Istio HA, LoadBalance, Rate limit
          • mTLS Autocert
        • Honeypot
          • Building honeypot using vcluster and Falco
        • Backup
          • Kasten K10
        • Secrets
          • Vault CSI Driver
      • Load Balance
        • Nginx
        • HAProxy
          • Proxy methods
          • HAProxy for RDP
          • Payment gateway A/B test with HAProxy
          • HAPRoxy for Percona or Galera
      • Monitoring
        • Zabbix
          • Apache Zabbix
          • Disc Quota
          • Nginx Zabbix
          • SSL certificates Zabix
          • Zabbix notifications
        • Nagios
          • Datacenter monitoring
        • Prometheus and Grafana
      • Windows
        • Sysmon enhanced Windows audit
        • Sysmon to Block Unwanted File
      • Linux
        • Rsync
        • Debian based
          • Apt-Cacher NG
          • Unattended Upgrades in Debian / Ubuntu
        • RedHat basede
          • RPM Server
        • Logs analysis
        • Build armhf qemu
      • NGFW
      • CI/CD
        • DevSecOps
          • DAST
            • Burp
              • Dastardly
            • StackHawk
            • ZAP and GitHub Actions
          • SAST
            • Checkmarx
            • OSV by Google
            • Snyk
            • SonarQube
        • GitLab Runner in Yandex Cloud
        • Dynamic Gitlab Runners in Yandex Cloud
        • GitLab runner in Kubernetes with Werf
        • Kubernetes deploy strategies
        • Kubernetes highload deploy. part 1
        • Kubernetes highload deploy. part 2
        • Kubernetes Argo Rollouts
        • Jenkins in Kubernetes
        • Ansible Semaphore
        • Image storage, scaning and signing
        • Install WireGuard with Gitlab and Terraform
        • CI/CD example fror small web app
        • Threat matrix for CI CD Pipeline
      • SIEM / SOC
        • Datadog
        • Splunk
          • Splunk — general description
        • MaxPatrol
          • MaxPatrol 8 and RedCheck Enterprise
        • QRadar IBM
        • Cloud Native Security Platform (CNAPP) - Aqua
        • OSSIM | AT&T
          • AlienVault (OSSIM) install
        • Wazuh
        • EDR
          • Cortex XDR | Palo Alto Networks
          • Cynet
          • FortiEDR | Fortinet
          • Elastic
        • Elastic
          • Install Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (Elastic Stack) on Ubuntu 22.04
          • Setting Up Elastic 8 with Kibana, Fleet, Endpoint Security, and Windows Log Collection
        • Threat Intelligence
          • MISP
          • msticpy Microsoft
          • X-Force | IBM
          • Elastic
      • VPN
        • Full-Mesh VPN fastd, tinc, VpnCloud
        • Wireguard
          • WireGuard for Internet access
          • WireGuard on MikroTik and Keenetic
          • WireGuard site to site
        • SoftEther VPN Project
        • Cisco AnyConnect client
        • OpenConnect
        • SSTP python server
      • OS hardening
        • CIS Benchmarks
      • Cloud Providers
      • OpenNebula
        • OpenNebula Edge Cloud - Open Source Cloud & Edge Computing
        • Discover OpenNebula – Open Source Cloud & Edge Computing Platform
        • OpenNebula Multi-Cloud
        • Kubernetes on OpenNebula
        • The Open Source Alternative to Nutanix
        • The Simple Alternative to OpenStack
        • OpenNebula Partner Ecosystem
      • OpenStack
        • Install manual
        • Install with DevStack
      • VM
        • Create a VHD file from a Linux disk
        • Backup / Migration
          • Coriolis
          • Proxmox Backup Server
        • oVirt
        • VMware vCenter
        • Proxmox
      • Docker
        • Container optimization
        • Ubuntu RDP container
      • LXC
        • LXD on Ubuntu 18.04
        • Install, Create and Manage LXC in Ubuntu/Debian
    • Big Data
      • OLAP data qubes
      • Storage and autoscale in Lerua
    • Machine Learning
      • Yandex YaLM 100B. GPT model
      • Kaggle Community Datasts Models
      • AI in video production
      • Image search
      • Chat bots
        • You.com
        • Chat GPT
          • Implementing GPT in NumPy
        • Jailbreak Chat
      • Coding plugins CodeWhisperer
    • Malware
      • Isiaon/Pitraix: Modern Cross-Platform Peer-to-Peer Botnet over TOR
      • theZoo A repository of LIVE malwares
    • Pentest
      • Red Team
        • MITRE ATT&CK matrix
        • C2 Frameworks
          • Brute Ratel C4
          • Cobalt Strike
          • Covenant
          • Havoc Framework
          • Merlin
          • Metasploit
          • Sillenttrinity
          • Sliver
        • Manage and report
          • Dradis Framework
          • Hexway
        • Underground
      • Social engineering
        • Social Engineer Toolkit setoolkit
      • OSINT
        • OSINT for comapny
        • Instagram fishing
      • Forensics
        • Forensics tools
      • Pentesting Methodology
      • Web
      • CI/CD Methodology
      • Cloud Methodology
        • Hacking The Cloud
      • Kubernetes Pentesting
      • Android
        • SSL Unpinning for Android applications
      • iOS
        • SSL unpinning iOS and macOS applications
      • HackBar tool
      • CyberChef Tools
      • Python virtualenv
      • IppSec - YouTube
      • Hacktricks.xyz
    • Compliance
      • 152 ФЗ. Personal data
      • PCI DSS and ГОСТ Р 57580.1-2017
      • Cloud compliance
      • ГОСТ Р 57580.1-2017 для Kubernetes
      • Kubernets as DevSecOps and NIST compliance
      • NIST SP 800-61 cyberincidece control
      • CIS Kubernetes Benchmark v1.6 - RKE2 v1.20
      • CIS Kubernetes Benchmark v1.23 - RKE2
      • Requirements for Russian Banks
      • Tools
        • Chef InSpec
        • Elastic SIEM
    • Asset management
      • CMDBuild
    • Project management
    • Incident management SRE
    • Risk management
      • IT risk management
      • BSI-Standard 200-3
    • Web Dev
      • Cookie security
      • OWASP Top 10 2021
      • Docker nginx php mysql
      • Docker tor hiddenservice nginx
      • Docker Compose wp nginx php mariadb
      • Dependency Checking
        • Nexus Analyzer
        • OWASP dependency-check
      • Yii skeeks cms
      • YiiStudio
    • Art
      • GTK Themes
      • Themes for Xfce Desktop
      • XFCE / Xubuntu Windows 95
      • Moscow events
      • Photo goods
      • Russian style gifts
    • Cryptocurrency
      • News
      • Arbitrage
      • Stocks
      • Exchange aggregators
      • Where to use
      • Prepaid cards
        • BitFree
        • Pyypl Your Money at Your Fingertips
    • IT magazines
      • WIKI and Writeups tools
        • BookStack
        • GitBook
        • MkDocs
        • Wiki.js
        • DokuWiki
    • Languages
    • Learning
      • (ISC)2
        • CISSP
      • Offensive Security
        • OSCP
        • OSEP
        • OSED
      • DevSecOps
        • Certified DevSecOps Professional (CDP)
        • Certified DevSecOps Expert (CDE)
      • Web Security Academy: PortSwigger
    • Relocation
      • London experience
      • IT visas in 2022
      • Remote work
      • Running business in UAE
    • Freenet
      • Independent online services: the philosophy of a free Internet
      • Tor Project Anonymity Online
      • I2P Anonymous Network
    • Services
      • SMS Registration
        • Registering ChatGPT in Russia
      • Local and regional eSIMs for travellers - Airalo
      • Digital busines cards
      • No KYC services and exchanges
Powered by GitBook
On this page

Was this helpful?

  1. Book
  2. Architect
  3. Kubernetes
  4. Network security

Cilium

Last updated 1 year ago

Was this helpful?

Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7-protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3-L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing.

Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube-proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced functionality like integrated ingress and egress gateway, bandwidth management and service mesh, and provides deep network and security visibility and monitoring.

A new Linux kernel technology called is at the foundation of Cilium. It supports dynamic insertion of eBPF bytecode into the Linux kernel at various integration points such as: network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints to implement security, networking and visibility logic. eBPF is highly efficient and flexible. To learn more about eBPF, visit .

Stable Releases

The Cilium community maintains minor stable releases for the last three minor Cilium versions. Older Cilium stable versions from minor releases prior to that are considered EOL.

Listed below are the actively maintained release branches along with their latest patch release, corresponding image pull tags and their release notes:

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/tree/v1.14
2023-09-11
quay.io/cilium/cilium:v1.14.2
https://github.com/cilium/cilium/releases/tag/v1.14.2

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/tree/v1.13

2023-09-11

quay.io/cilium/cilium:v1.13.7

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/releases/tag/v1.13.7

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/tree/v1.12

2023-09-11

quay.io/cilium/cilium:v1.12.14

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/releases/tag/v1.12.14

Architectures

Cilium images are distributed for AMD64 and AArch64 architectures.

Software Bill of Materials

Development

Listed below are branches for testing along with their snapshots or RC releases, corresponding image pull tags and their release notes where applicable:

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/commits/main
daily
quay.io/cilium/cilium-ci:latest
N/A

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/commits/v1.15.0-pre.1

2023-09-30

quay.io/cilium/cilium:v1.15.0-pre.1

https://github.com/cilium/cilium/releases/tag/v1.15.0-pre.1

Functionality Overview Protect and secure APIs transparently

Ability to secure modern application protocols such as REST/HTTP, gRPC and Kafka. Traditional firewalls operates at Layer 3 and 4. A protocol running on a particular port is either completely trusted or blocked entirely. Cilium provides the ability to filter on individual application protocol requests such as:

  • Allow all HTTP requests with method GET and path /public/.*. Deny all other requests.

  • Allow service1 to produce on Kafka topic topic1 and service2 to consume on topic1. Reject all other Kafka messages.

  • Require the HTTP header X-Token: [0-9]+ to be present in all REST calls.

Secure service to service communication based on identities

Modern distributed applications rely on technologies such as application containers to facilitate agility in deployment and scale out on demand. This results in a large number of application containers to be started in a short period of time. Typical container firewalls secure workloads by filtering on source IP addresses and destination ports. This concept requires the firewalls on all servers to be manipulated whenever a container is started anywhere in the cluster.

In order to avoid this situation which limits scale, Cilium assigns a security identity to groups of application containers which share identical security policies. The identity is then associated with all network packets emitted by the application containers, allowing to validate the identity at the receiving node. Security identity management is performed using a key-value store.

Secure access to and from external services

Label based security is the tool of choice for cluster internal access control. In order to secure access to and from external services, traditional CIDR based security policies for both ingress and egress are supported. This allows to limit access to and from application containers to particular IP ranges.

Simple Networking

A simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters connects all application containers. IP allocation is kept simple by using host scope allocators. This means that each host can allocate IPs without any coordination between hosts.

The following multi node networking models are supported:

  • Overlay: Encapsulation-based virtual network spanning all hosts. Currently VXLAN and Geneve are baked in but all encapsulation formats supported by Linux can be enabled.

    When to use this mode: This mode has minimal infrastructure and integration requirements. It works on almost any network infrastructure as the only requirement is IP connectivity between hosts which is typically already given.

  • Native Routing: Use of the regular routing table of the Linux host. The network is required to be capable to route the IP addresses of the application containers.

    When to use this mode: This mode is for advanced users and requires some awareness of the underlying networking infrastructure. This mode works well with:

    • Native IPv6 networks

    • In conjunction with cloud network routers

    • If you are already running routing daemons

Load Balancing

Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between application containers and to external services and is able to fully replace components such as kube-proxy. The load balancing is implemented in eBPF using efficient hashtables allowing for almost unlimited scale.

For north-south type load balancing, Cilium's eBPF implementation is optimized for maximum performance, can be attached to XDP (eXpress Data Path), and supports direct server return (DSR) as well as Maglev consistent hashing if the load balancing operation is not performed on the source host.

For east-west type load balancing, Cilium performs efficient service-to-backend translation right in the Linux kernel's socket layer (e.g. at TCP connect time) such that per-packet NAT operations overhead can be avoided in lower layers.

Bandwidth Management

Cilium implements bandwidth management through efficient EDT-based (Earliest Departure Time) rate-limiting with eBPF for container traffic that is egressing a node. This allows to significantly reduce transmission tail latencies for applications and to avoid locking under multi-queue NICs compared to traditional approaches such as HTB (Hierarchy Token Bucket) or TBF (Token Bucket Filter) as used in the bandwidth CNI plugin, for example.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

The ability to gain visibility and to troubleshoot issues is fundamental to the operation of any distributed system. While we learned to love tools like tcpdump and ping and while they will always find a special place in our hearts, we strive to provide better tooling for troubleshooting. This includes tooling to provide:

  • Event monitoring with metadata: When a packet is dropped, the tool doesn't just report the source and destination IP of the packet, the tool provides the full label information of both the sender and receiver among a lot of other information.

  • Metrics export via Prometheus: Key metrics are exported via Prometheus for integration with your existing dashboards.

Getting Started

What is eBPF and XDP?

Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) is a Linux kernel bytecode interpreter originally introduced to filter network packets, e.g. for tcpdump and socket filters. The BPF instruction set and surrounding architecture has recently been significantly reworked with additional data structures such as hash tables and arrays for keeping state as well as additional actions to support packet mangling, forwarding, encapsulation, etc. Furthermore, a compiler back end for LLVM allows for programs to be written in C and compiled into BPF instructions. An in-kernel verifier ensures that BPF programs are safe to run and a JIT compiler converts the BPF bytecode to CPU architecture specific instructions for native execution efficiency. BPF programs can be run at various hooking points in the kernel such as for incoming packets, outgoing packets, system calls, kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, etc.

BPF continues to evolve and gain additional capabilities with each new Linux release. Cilium leverages BPF to perform core data path filtering, mangling, monitoring and redirection, and requires BPF capabilities that are in any Linux kernel version 4.8.0 or newer (the latest current stable Linux kernel is 4.14.x).

Many Linux distributions including CoreOS, Debian, Docker's LinuxKit, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu already ship kernel versions >= 4.8.x. You can check your Linux kernel version by running uname -a. If you are not yet running a recent enough kernel, check the Documentation of your Linux distribution on how to run Linux kernel 4.9.x or later.

XDP is a further step in evolution and enables to run a specific flavor of BPF programs from the network driver with direct access to the packet's DMA buffer. This is, by definition, the earliest possible point in the software stack, where programs can be attached to in order to allow for a programmable, high performance packet processor in the Linux kernel networking data path.

Community Slack

Special Interest Groups (SIG)

Developer meetings

The Cilium developer community hangs out on Zoom to chat. Everybody is welcome.

eBPF & Cilium Office Hours livestream

Governance

Adopters

Roadmap

License

For upgrades to new minor releases please consult the .

Starting with Cilium version 1.13.0, all images include a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). The SBOM is generated in format. More information on this is available on .

For development and testing purpose, the Cilium community publishes snapshots, early release candidates (RC) and CI container images build from the . These images are not for use in production.

For testing upgrades to new development releases please consult the latest development build of the .

See the section in our documentation for the latest list of supported protocols and examples on how to use it.

: An observability platform specifically written for Cilium. It provides service dependency maps, operational monitoring and alerting, and application and security visibility based on flow logs.

To read up on the necessary kernel versions to run the BPF runtime, see the section .

Further information about BPF and XDP targeted for developers can be found in the .

To know more about Cilium, it's extensions and use cases around Cilium and BPF take a look at section.

Join the Cilium to chat with Cilium developers and other Cilium users. This is a good place to learn about Cilium, ask questions, and share your experiences.

See for a list of all SIGs and their meeting times.

Weekly, Wednesday, 5:00 pm (CET/CEST), usually equivalent to 8:00 am PT, or 11:00 am ET.

Third Wednesday of each month, 9:00 am (JST).

We host a weekly community which (very loosely!) stands for eBPF & Cilium Office Hours. Join us live, catch up with past episodes, or head over to the and let us know your ideas for topics we should cover.

The Cilium project is governed by a group of . How they are selected and govern is outlined in our .

A list of adopters of the Cilium project who are deploying it in production, and of their use cases, can be found in file .

Cilium maintains a . It gives a a high-level view of the main priorities for the project, the maturity of different features and projects, and how to influence the project direction.

The Cilium user space components are licensed under the . The BPF code templates are dual-licensed under the and the (you can use the terms of either license, at your option).

Cilium Upgrade Guide
SPDX
Cilium SBOM
main branch
Cilium Upgrade Guide
Layer 7 Policy
Hubble
Why Cilium?
Getting Started
Architecture and Concepts
Installing Cilium
Frequently Asked Questions
Contributing
Prerequisites
Cilium/68747470733a2f2f63646e2e6a7364656c6976722e6e65742f67682f63696c69756d2f63696c69756d406d61696e2f446f63756d656e746174696f6e2f696d616765732f6270662d6f766572766965772e706e67
BPF and XDP Reference Guide
Further Readings
Slack channel
Special Interest groups
Europe/Zurich time
Join Zoom
Japan time
Join Zoom
YouTube livestream called eCHO
eCHO repo
Maintainers and Committers
governance document
USERS.md
public roadmap
Apache License, Version 2.0
General Public License, Version 2.0 (only)
2-Clause BSD License
https://github.com/cilium/cilium
eBPF
eBPF.io