SPIFFE

Establish trust between software workloads in distributed systems with Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE). SPIFFE assigns unique IDs to workloads, allowing workloads to verify identities and communicate securely. This ensures secure authentication across dynamic environments.

The SPIFFE IDs are contained in the SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document (SVID). SVIDs are used by workloads to verify their identity to other workloads so that the workloads can communicate with each other. The two main SVID formats are:

  • X.509-SVIDs: X.509 certificates where the SPIFFE ID is embedded in the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field.

  • JWT-SVIDs: JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) where the SPIFFE ID is included as the sub claim.

For more information, see SPIFFE Overview.