Technology · Ebook

Tokenetes: Transaction Tokens for Microservices

by Shriira Press

Tokenetes is a CNCF sandbox project that implements Transaction Tokens — the IETF OAuth draft for carrying trustworthy identity and context through a microservice call chain. The problem is old and stubborn: once a request crosses the edge and fans out internally, the original who and why evaporate, and services trust each other simply because they share a network. Tokenetes restores that lost context with a short-lived, signed JWT called a TraT that immutably asserts the external user and the purpose of a call, verified at every hop. This book covers the confused-deputy problem, the anatomy of a TraT, the Tokenetes Service, Agent sidecar, and Kubernetes resources, interception versus delegation modes, the end-to-end request flow, and where it all fits.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Confused Deputy in the Cluster
3. 3Chapter 2 — What a Transaction Token Is
4. 4Chapter 3 — The Tokenetes Architecture
5. 5Chapter 4 — Rules as Kubernetes Resources
6. 6Chapter 5 — Interception and Delegation
7. 7Chapter 6 — The Request Flow End to End
8. 8Chapter 7 — Tokenetes in Practice