Gateway API integrator security overview

This explanation covers several security-related topics for the Gateway API integrator charm. This charm is a configurator charm and, as such, is workloadless.

Risks

As a workloadless charm, the attack surface is restricted to that of Juju’s. You can find best practices for Juju itself in the Juju security documentation.

Machine-in-the-middle attack

This type of attack refers to an attacker intercepting traffic between a client and the service and impersonating the intended recipient, for example to trick a user into revealing sensitive data. As an ingress proxy, the charm routes client requests to backend services, so encrypting that traffic helps prevent interception and downgrade attacks.

Good practices

By default, the charm enforces HTTPS by redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS and injecting a Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) header. Provide a TLS certificate through the certificates integration and keep HTTPS enforcement enabled. See How to configure HTTPS enforcement for details on configuring this behaviour. The HSTS header’s max-age is configurable; see How to configure HSTS.

Summary

  • Use TLS certificates to encrypt traffic.

  • Keep HTTPS enforcement enabled.

  • Keep the HSTS max-age at a suitable value so browsers continue to enforce HTTPS.