Cloud Native Computing Foundation Production Identity Day: SPIFFE + SPIRE North America 2021, 30 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Federating Trust in Healthcare with SPIFFE - Sunil Ravipati, Anthem

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Federating Trust in Healthcare with SPIFFE - Sunil Ravipati, Anthem

Healthcare systems and data has been subjected to cyber attacks and ransomware since long time. This session will be about how healthcare systems and data consisting of PHI and PII will be secured with a new paradigm shift in technology using cloud native zero trust solution to have workload identity and trust within healthcare systems and extending zero trust with partner's healthcare systems to securely authenticate and exchange data.

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Hello welcome everyone. My name is sunil ravi pari. I lead zero trust initiatives at anthem. Today's session is about federating trust in health care, with spiffy.

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Essentially, health care systems and data have been subjected to cyber attacks and ransomware since long time. This session will talk about how healthcare systems and data consisting of phi and pi will be secured, with a new paradigm shift in technologies in cloud native, zero trust solution to have workload, identity and trust within healthcare systems and extending this zero trust uh to partners. Healthcare systems which connect with anthem's health, os platform to securely authenticate and exchange data.

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So what's zero trust. Most of you might be familiar with zero trust, which could be defined in various uh ways, but nist coined the definition saying that it's an evolving set of cyber security paradigms that move defenses from static network based perimeter to focus on user assets and resources.

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A zero trust architecture uses zero trust principles to plan industrial and enterprise infrastructure and workflows, and also it assumes that there is no implicit press granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their network. Location, authentication and authorization are two discrete functions performed before a session to an enterprise resource is established and also zero.

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Trust is a response to enterprise networking trends that include remote users, bring your own device and cloud-based assets that are not located within enterprise owned boundary and also zero trust focuses on protecting resources such as asset services, workflows network, as a network location, is no longer seen as a prime component to the security posture of the resource.

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Anthem healthwatch platform harnesses uh millions of members of healthcare data.

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Of anthems, members and how can anthem use its member data essentially so the platform provides insights and also the benefits offered by healthos is that its access and operating system uh to enable seamless health plan provider, collaboration.

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So this healthcare platform can also extend, or rather provide insights into the member data by ex by giving external clients access to this platform.

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So the answer to this is to essentially federate across the clusters, so the benefits of provide up doing a federated zero trust approach is that using spiffy is that it provides a mutual tls between services and has endpoint verification and also integrates container orchestrated like kubernetes.

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So the tech stack, which does the heavy lifting is essentially mutual tls spiffy inspire, is jot token and policy agents for authorization and for monitoring, observability agents.

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Let's dig deeper into the architecture itself by taking here an exam, an example of a existing federated architecture.

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With an external client robin so robin is an external client would like to get insights of anthem's member data through health os platform.

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So here we have robin's eks, cluster and health.cks cluster, so we required that there are a requirement set of requirements like it should be running on linux.

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And have ports open for tcp connections and all the outbound ports, and also there's a storage available on kubernetes to have pvc so once we deploy these spire servers on both the clusters and the agents, um as well as the on voip proxy uh to do the uh proxy connection, the federated approach of spiffy architecture would have the trust plus domain set up and then have the configurations on both the cluster setup to point to each other's trust, domains and the open ports and then have the test bundle exchange between the health, os cluster and the robin cluster.

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So that way the whole end to end federation is configured set up and bootstrapped.

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So if you can see in the architecture diagram here this, this fire server from the health os and robin they talk to each other, to establish that trust.

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And then the workload identity happens on each cluster for the workloads they are interacting. With on health os, there are certain services like healthcare's gateway and healthos authentication, and on the robbins cluster you have robin service, which would authenticate with healthhouse gateway through the onvoy proxy and then use a once authenticated user api to get member data uh and insights from the healthwest platform.

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So this is the high level architecture and a high level fed inspired spf federation use case with an external client from anthem's health os to a robin partner. But this this could be replicated with multiple partners and set up the multiple federations and scale up for giving insights into health anthems. Member data.

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So going to the next um so so once since we have this uh federation to establish now, if there are any other questions I'll be available uh on the chat, please ping me or you can contact me offline.