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Deploying Wallarm Sidecar

To secure an application deployed as a Pod in a Kubernetes cluster, you can run the NGINX-based Wallarm node in front of the application as a sidecar controller. Wallarm sidecar controller will filter incoming traffic to the application Pod by allowing only legitimate requests and mitigating malicious ones.

The key features of the Wallarm Sidecar solution:

  • Simplifies protection of discrete microservices and their replicas and shards by providing the deployment format that is similar to applications

  • Fully compatible with any Ingress controller

  • Works stable under high loads that is usually common for the service mesh approach

  • Requires minimum service configuration to secure your apps; just add some annotations and labels for the application pod to protect it

  • Supports two modes of the Wallarm container deployment: for medium loads with the Wallarm services running in one container and for high loads with the Wallarm services split into several containers

  • Provides a dedicated entity for the postanalytics module that is the local data analytics backend for the Wallarm sidecar solution consuming most of the memory

Use cases

Among all supported Wallarm deployment options, this solution is the recommended one for the following use cases:

  • You are looking for the security solution to be deployed to the infrastructure with the existing Ingress controller (e.g. AWS ALB Ingress Controller) preventing you from deployment of either Wallarm NGINX-based or Wallarm Kong-based Ingress controller

  • Zero-trust environment that requires each microservice (including internal APIs) to be protected by the security solution

Traffic flow

Traffic flow with Wallarm Sidecar:

Traffic flow with Wallarm Sidecar

Solution architecture

The Wallarm Sidecar solution is arranged by the following Deployment objects:

  • Sidecar controller (wallarm-sidecar-controller) is the mutating admission webhook that injects Wallarm sidecar resources into the Pod configuring it based on the Helm chart values and pod annotations and connecting the node components to the Wallarm Cloud.

    Once a new pod with the wallarm-sidecar: enabled label in Kubernetes starts, the controller automatically injects the additional container filtering incoming traffic into the pod.

  • Postanalytics module (wallarm-sidecar-postanalytics) is the local data analytics backend for the Wallarm sidecar solution. The module uses the in-memory storage Tarantool and the set of some helper containers (like the collectd, attack export services).

Wallarm deployment objects

The Wallarm Sidecar has 2 standard stages in its lifecycle:

  1. At the initial stage, the controller injects Wallarm sidecar resources into the Pod configuring it based on the Helm chart values and pod annotations and connecting the node components to the Wallarm Cloud.

  2. At the runtime stage, the solution analyzes and proxies/forwards requests involving the postanalytics module.

The solution uses Docker images based on Alpine Linux and the NGINX version provided by Alpine. Currently, the latest images use Alpine Linux version 3.20, which includes NGINX stable version 1.26.1.

Requirements

  • Kubernetes platform version 1.19-1.29

  • Helm v3 package manager

  • An application deployed as a Pod in a Kubernetes cluster

  • Access to https://us1.api.wallarm.com for working with US Wallarm Cloud or to https://api.wallarm.com for working with EU Wallarm Cloud

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

  • 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 and API specifications, 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
34.102.90.100
34.94.156.115
35.235.115.105

    34.160.38.183
34.144.227.90
34.90.110.226

  • Access to the account with the Administrator role in Wallarm Console for the US Cloud or the EU Cloud

Deployment

To deploy the Wallarm Sidecar solution:

  1. Generate a filtering node token.

  2. Deploy the Wallarm Helm chart.

  3. Attach the Wallarm Sidecar to the application Pod.

  4. Test the Wallarm Sidecar operation.

Step 1: Generate a filtering node token

Generate a filtering node token of the appropriate type to connect the sidecar pods 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.
  1. Open Wallarm Console → Nodes in either the US Cloud or EU Cloud.
  2. Create a filtering node with the Wallarm node type and copy the generated token.

Creation of a Wallarm node

Step 2: Deploy the Wallarm Helm chart

  1. Add the Wallarm chart repository:

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

  2. Create the values.yaml file with the Wallarm Sidecar configuration. Example of the file with the minimum configuration is below.

    When using an API token, specify a node group name in the nodeGroup parameter. Your nodes created for the sidecar pods will be assigned to this group, shown in the Wallarm Console's Nodes section. The default group name is defaultSidecarGroup. If required, you can later set filtering node group names individually for the pods of the applications they protect, using the sidecar.wallarm.io/wallarm-node-group annotation.

    config:
  wallarm:
    api:
      token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
      host: "us1.api.wallarm.com"
      # nodeGroup: "defaultSidecarGroup"

    config:
  wallarm:
    api:
      token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
      # nodeGroup: "defaultSidecarGroup"

    <NODE_TOKEN> is the token of the Wallarm node to be run in Kubernetes.

    Using one token for several installations

    You can use one token in several installations regardless of the selected platform. It allows logical grouping of node instances in the Wallarm Console UI. Example: you deploy several Wallarm nodes to a development environment, each node is on its own machine owned by a certain developer.

  3. Deploy the Wallarm Helm chart:

    helm install --version 5.1.0 <RELEASE_NAME> wallarm/wallarm-sidecar --wait -n wallarm-sidecar --create-namespace -f <PATH_TO_VALUES>
    • <RELEASE_NAME> is the name for the Helm release of the Wallarm Sidecar chart
    • wallarm-sidecar is the new namespace to deploy the Helm release with the Wallarm Sidecar chart, it is recommended to deploy it to a separate namespace
    • <PATH_TO_VALUES> is the path to the values.yaml file

Step 3: Attach the Wallarm Sidecar to the application Pod

For Wallarm to filter application traffic, add the wallarm-sidecar: enabled label to the corresponding application Pod:

kubectl edit deployment -n <APPLICATION_NAMESPACE> <APP_LABEL_VALUE>

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: default
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
        wallarm-sidecar: enabled
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: application
          image: kennethreitz/httpbin
          ports:
            - name: http
              containerPort: 80

  • If the wallarm-sidecar application Pod label is either set to disabled or not explicitly specified, the Wallarm Sidecar container is not injected into a pod and therefore Wallarm does not filter traffic.

  • If the wallarm-sidecar application Pod label is set to enabled, the Wallarm Sidecar container is injected into a pod and therefore Wallarm filters incoming traffic.

Step 4: Test the Wallarm Sidecar operation

To test that the Wallarm Sidecar operates correctly:

  1. Get the Wallarm control plane details to check it has been successfully started:

    kubectl get pods -n wallarm-sidecar -l app.kubernetes.io/name=wallarm-sidecar

    Each pod should display the following: READY: N/N and STATUS: Running, e.g.:

    NAME                                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
wallarm-sidecar-controller-54cf88b989-gp2vg      1/1     Running   0          91m
wallarm-sidecar-postanalytics-86d9d4b6cd-hpd5k   4/4     Running   0          91m

  2. Get the application pod details to check the Wallarm sidecar container has been successfully injected:

    kubectl get pods -n <APPLICATION_NAMESPACE> --selector app=<APP_LABEL_VALUE>

    The output should display READY: 2/2 pointing to successful sidecar container injection and STATUS: Running pointing to successful connection to the Wallarm Cloud:

    NAME                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
myapp-5c48c97b66-lzkwf   2/2     Running   0          3h4m

  3. Send the test Path Traversal attack to the application cluster address Wallarm is enabled to filter traffic:

    curl http://<APPLICATION_CLUSTER_IP>/etc/passwd

    Since the Wallarm proxy operates in the monitoring filtration mode by default, the Wallarm node will not block the attack but will register it.

    To check that the attack has been registered, proceed to Wallarm Console → Attacks:

    Attacks in the interface

ARM64 deployment

With the Sidecar proxy's Helm chart version 4.10.2, ARM64 processor compatibility is introduced. Initially set for x86 architectures, deploying on ARM64 nodes involves modifying the Helm chart parameters.

In ARM64 settings, Kubernetes nodes often carry an arm64 label. To assist the Kubernetes scheduler in allocating the Wallarm workload to the appropriate node type, reference this label using nodeSelector, tolerations, or affinity rules in the Wallarm Helm chart configuration.

Below is the Wallarm Helm chart example for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which uses the kubernetes.io/arch: arm64 label for relevant nodes. This template is modifiable for compatibility with other cloud setups, respecting their ARM64 labeling conventions.

config:
  wallarm:
    api:
      token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
      # If using an API token, uncomment the following line and specify your node group name
      # nodeGroup: "defaultSidecarGroup"
  postanalytics:
    nodeSelector:
      kubernetes.io/arch: arm64
  controller:
    nodeSelector:
      kubernetes.io/arch: arm64

config:
  wallarm:
    api:
      token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
      # If using an API token, uncomment the following line and specify your node group name
      # nodeGroup: "defaultSidecarGroup"
  postanalytics:
    tolerations:
      - key: kubernetes.io/arch
        operator: Equal
        value: arm64
        effect: NoSchedule
  controller:
    tolerations:
      - key: kubernetes.io/arch
        operator: Equal
        value: arm64
        effect: NoSchedule

Security Context Constraints (SCC) in OpenShift

When installing the Sidecar solution into an OpenShift platform, it is necessary to define a custom Security Context Constraint (SCC) to suit the security requirements of the platform. The default constraints may be insufficient for the Wallarm solution, potentially leading to errors.

Below is the recommended custom SCC for the Wallarm Sidecar solution tailored for OpenShift. This configuration is designed for running the solution in non-privileged mode without iptables usage.

Apply the SCC before deploying the solution

Ensure the SCC is applied prior to deploying the Wallarm Sidecar solution.

  1. Define the custom SCC in the wallarm-scc.yaml file as follows:

    allowHostDirVolumePlugin: false
allowHostIPC: false
allowHostNetwork: false
allowHostPID: false
allowHostPorts: false
allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
allowPrivilegedContainer: false
allowedCapabilities:
- NET_BIND_SERVICE
apiVersion: security.openshift.io/v1
defaultAddCapabilities: null
fsGroup:
  type: MustRunAs
groups: []
kind: SecurityContextConstraints
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/description: wallarm-sidecar-deployment
  name: wallarm-sidecar-deployment
priority: null
readOnlyRootFilesystem: false
requiredDropCapabilities:
- ALL
runAsUser:
  type: MustRunAs
  uid: 101
seLinuxContext:
  type: MustRunAs
seccompProfiles:
- runtime/default
supplementalGroups:
  type: RunAsAny
users: []
volumes:
- configMap
- emptyDir
- secret

  2. Apply this policy to a cluster:

    kubectl apply -f wallarm-scc.yaml

  3. Allow the Wallarm Sidecar solution to use this SCC policy:

    oc adm policy add-scc-to-user wallarm-sidecar-deployment system:serviceaccount:<WALLARM_SIDECAR_NAMESPACE>:<POSTANALYTICS_POD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME>
    • <WALLARM_SIDECAR_NAMESPACE> is a namespace where the Wallarm Sidecar solution will be deployed.
    • <POSTANALYTICS_POD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME> is auto-generated and usually follows the format <RELEASE_NAME>-wallarm-sidecar-postanalytics, where <RELEASE_NAME> is the Helm release name you will assign during helm install.

    For example, assuming the namespace name is wallarm-sidecar and the Helm release name is wlrm-sidecar, the command would look like this:

    oc adm policy add-scc-to-user wallarm-sidecar-deployment system:serviceaccount:wallarm-sidecar:wlrm-sidecar-wallarm-sidecar-postanalytics

  4. Proceed with the Sidecar solution deployment, ensuring you use the same namespace and Helm release name for the Sidecar solution as previously mentioned.

  5. Disable the usage of iptables to eliminate the need for a privileged iptables container. This can be accomplished either globally by modifying the values.yaml file or on a per-pod basis.

    1. In the values.yaml, set config.injectionStrategy.iptablesEnable to false.

      config:
  injectionStrategy:
    iptablesEnable: false
  wallarm:
    api:
      ...

    2. Update the spec.ports.targetPort setting in your Service manifest to point to the proxy port. If iptables-based traffic capture is disabled, the Wallarm sidecar container will publish a port with the name proxy.

      apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp-svc
  namespace: default
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 80
      targetPort: proxy
      protocol: TCP
      name: http
  selector:
    app: myapp
    1. Disable iptables on a per-pod basis by setting the Pod's annotation sidecar.wallarm.io/sidecar-injection-iptables-enable to "false".
    2. Update the spec.ports.targetPort setting in your Service manifest to point to the proxy port. If iptables-based traffic capture is disabled, the Wallarm sidecar container will publish a port with the name proxy.
    apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: default
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
        wallarm-sidecar: enabled
      annotations:
        sidecar.wallarm.io/sidecar-injection-iptables-enable: "false"
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: application
          image: kennethreitz/httpbin
          ports:
            - name: http
              containerPort: 80
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp-svc
  namespace: default
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 80
      targetPort: proxy
      protocol: TCP
      name: http
  selector:
    app: myapp

  6. To verify the correct SCC application to the postanalytics pod from the previous step, execute the following commands:

    WALLARM_SIDECAR_NAMESPACE="wallarm-sidecar"
POD=$(kubectl -n ${WALLARM_SIDECAR_NAMESPACE} get pods -o name -l "app.kubernetes.io/component=postanalytics" | cut -d '/' -f 2)
kubectl -n ${WALLARM_SIDECAR_NAMESPACE}  get pod ${POD} -o jsonpath='{.metadata.annotations.openshift\.io\/scc}{"\n"}'

    The expected output should be wallarm-sidecar-deployment.

  7. Update the SCC for your application pod to match the permissions in the initial wallarm-sidecar-deployment policy, especially the allowance of UID 101 in the runAsUser block. This is crucial as the Wallarm sidecar container, injected during deployment, runs under UID 101 and requires specific permissions.

    Use the command below to apply the wallarm-sidecar-deployment policy you previously created. Typically, you would develop a custom policy tailored to your application's and Wallarm's requirements.

    oc adm policy add-scc-to-user wallarm-sidecar-deployment system:<APP_NAMESPACE>:<APP_POD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME>

  8. Deploy the application with the updated SCC, e.g.:

    kubectl -n <APP_NAMESPACE> apply -f <MANIFEST_FILE>

Customization

Wallarm pods have been injected based on the default values.yaml and the custom configuration you specified on the 2nd deployment step.

You can customize the Wallarm proxy behavior even more on both the global and per-pod levels and get the most out of the Wallarm solution for your company.

Just proceed to the Wallarm proxy solution customization guide.