Origin Authentication and RBAC in Istio with Custom Identity Provider

The concept of access control can be boiled down to two factors: authentication (AuthN) and authorization (AuthZ). While authentication determines the identity of a client based on the data presented to the identity provider (e.g., Google and Microsoft AD), authorization determines whether an authenticated principal may interact with the resource.

Istio supports Token-based end-user authentication with JSON Web Tokens or JWT. In terms of Istio, the process of authentication of the end-user, which might be a person or a device, is known as origin authentication. Istio allows you to validate nearly all the fields of a JWT token presented to it. Since JWT is an industry-standard token format, the origin authentication feature of Istio is compatible with OpenID connect providers such as Auth0, Google Auth, and Key Cloak.