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Wallarm Connector for Istio Ingress

Wallarm provides a connector for securing APIs managed by Istio to analyze traffic out-of-band (OOB). By deploying Wallarm nodes alongside Istio's Envoy proxies, the connector mirrors incoming traffic, sending it asynchronously for analysis while allowing traffic to continue flowing uninterrupted.

The integration relies on a Lua plugin, deployed within the Envoy proxy, to handle traffic mirroring and communication with the Wallarm node.

Istio with Wallarm plugin

Use cases

This solution is recommended when real-time traffic analysis is unnecessary, and asynchronous analysis is sufficient.

Among all supported Wallarm deployment options, this is the optimal choice for securing APIs managed by Istio running with Envoy proxy in Kubernetes.

Limitations

This setup allows fine-tuning Wallarm only via the Wallarm Console UI. Some Wallarm features that require file-based configuration are not supported in this implementation, such as:

Requirements

To proceed with the deployment, ensure that you meet the following requirements:

  • Istio with Envoy proxy managing API traffic in your Kubernetes cluster

  • Helm v3 package manager

  • Access to https://us1.api.wallarm.com (US Wallarm Cloud) or to https://api.wallarm.com (EU Wallarm Cloud)

  • Access to https://charts.wallarm.com to add the Wallarm Helm chart

  • Access to the Wallarm repositories on Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/r/wallarm

  • Access to the IP addresses below for downloading updates to attack detection rules, as well as retrieving precise IPs for your allowlisted, denylisted, or graylisted countries, regions, or data centers

    34.96.64.17
34.110.183.149
35.235.66.155

    34.160.38.183
34.144.227.90
34.90.110.226

  • Administrator access to Wallarm Console for US Cloud or EU Cloud

Deployment

To secure APIs managed by Istio and Envoy proxy, follow these steps:

  1. Deploy the Wallarm filtering node service in your Kubernetes cluster.

  2. Configure the Envoy proxy in Istio to mirror traffic and send it to the Wallarm node for out-of-band analysis.

Step 1: Deploy a Wallarm node

Deploy the Wallarm node as a separate service in your Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

  1. Generate an API token to connect the Wallarm node to the Wallarm Cloud:

    1. Open Wallarm Console → Settings → API tokens in the US Cloud or EU Cloud.
    2. Find or create API token with the Deploy source role.
    3. Copy this token.

  2. Add the Wallarm chart repository:

    helm repo add wallarm https://charts.wallarm.com
helm repo update wallarm

  3. Deploy the Wallarm filtering node service:

    helm upgrade --install --version 0.5.3 <WALLARM_RELEASE_NAME> wallarm/wallarm-node-next -n wallarm-node --create-namespace --set config.api.token=<WALLARM_API_TOKEN> --set config.api.host=us1.api.wallarm.com --set config.connector.http_inspector.real_ip_header=X-Real-IP

    helm upgrade --install --version 0.5.3 <WALLARM_RELEASE_NAME> wallarm/wallarm-node-next -n wallarm-node --create-namespace --set config.api.token=<WALLARM_API_TOKEN> --set config.api.host=api.wallarm.com --set config.connector.http_inspector.real_ip_header=X-Real-IP

    config.connector.http_inspector.real_ip_header specifies the header to extract the client's real IP address when traffic passes through proxies or load balancers.

Step 2: Configure Envoy to mirror traffic to the Wallarm node

  1. Contact support@wallarm.com to obtain the Wallarm Lua plugin code for Istio. The filenames provided by the support team are used in the following steps.

  2. Apply the Envoy filter and cluster configuration to mirror traffic to the Wallarm node using Lua scripts:

    kubectl apply -f wallarm-envoy-gw-http-filter.yaml
kubectl apply -f wallarm-envoy-cluster-svc-endpoint.yaml

  3. Create ConfigMaps to mount the Wallarm connector and its Lua dependencies within the Istio Ingress controller namespace:

    kubectl -n <ISTIO_INGRESS_NS> apply -f wallarm-cm-lua-mpack-lib.yaml
kubectl -n <ISTIO_INGRESS_NS> apply -f wallarm-cm-lua-rrasync.yaml

  4. Modify the Istio Ingress Gateway deployment to mount these ConfigMaps by applying the patch.yaml file:

    kubectl -n <ISTIO_INGRESS_NS> patch deploy istio-ingressgateway --type strategic --patch-file patch.yaml

Testing

To test the functionality of the deployed connector, follow these steps:

  1. Verify that the Wallarm pods are up and running:

    kubectl -n wallarm-node get pods

    wallarm-node is the namespace where the Wallarm node service is deployed.

    Each pod status should be STATUS: Running or READY: N/N. For example:

    NAME                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
next-aggregation-5fb5d5444b-6c8n8   3/3     Running   0          51m
next-processing-7c487bbdc6-4j6mz    3/3     Running   0          51m

  2. Send the request with the test Path Traversal attack to the Istio Gateway:

    curl https://<ISTIO_GATEWAY_IP>/etc/passwd

  3. Open Wallarm Console → Attacks section in the US Cloud or EU Cloud and make sure the attack is displayed in the list.

    Attacks in the interface

    Since the connector operates in the out-of-band mode and does not block malicious requests, the Wallarm node will not block the attack but will register it.

  4. If needed, monitor the Wallarm logs in a separate console window:

    kubectl -n gonode logs next-processing-7c487bbdc6-4j6mz --tail 100 -f