A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes

BRANK

Modern applications tend to be composed from relationships between smaller applications. Secure modern applications thus need a way to express and enforce security policies that span multiple services. This is the “server-to-server” (S2S) authentication and authorization problem (for simplicity, I’ll mash both concepts into the term “auth” for most of this post).Designers today have a lot of options for S2S auth, but there isn’t much clarity about what the options are or why you’d select any of them. Bad decisions sometimes result. What follows is a stab at clearing the question up.Cast Of CharactersAlice and Bob are services on a production VPC. Alice wants to make a request of Bob. How can we design a system that allows this to happen?Here’s, I think, a pretty comprehensive overview of available S2S schemes. I’ve done my best to describe the “what’s” and minimize the “why’s”, beyond just explaining the motivation for each scheme. Importantly, these are all things that…