Install the Istio CNI node agent

The Istio CNI node agent is used to configure traffic redirection for pods in the mesh. It runs as a DaemonSet, on every node, with elevated privileges. The CNI node agent is used by both Istio data plane modes.

For the sidecar data plane mode, the Istio CNI node agent is optional. It removes the requirement of running privileged init containers in every pod in the mesh, replacing that model with a single privileged node agent pod on each Kubernetes node.

The Istio CNI node agent is required in the ambient data plane mode.

This guide is focused on using the Istio CNI node agent as an optional part of the sidecar data plane mode. Consult the ambient mode documentation for information on using the ambient data plane mode.

Follow this guide to install, configure, and use the Istio CNI node agent with the sidecar data plane mode.

How sidecar traffic redirection works

Using the init container (without the Istio CNI node agent)

By default Istio injects an init container, istio-init, in pods deployed in the mesh. The istio-init container sets up the pod network traffic redirection to/from the Istio sidecar proxy. This requires the user or service-account deploying pods to the mesh to have sufficient Kubernetes RBAC permissions to deploy containers with the NET_ADMIN and NET_RAW capabilities.

Using the Istio CNI node agent

Requiring Istio users to have elevated Kubernetes RBAC permissions is problematic for some organizations’ security compliance, as is the requirement to deploy privileged init containers with every workload.

The istio-cni node agent is effectively a replacement for the istio-init container that enables the same networking functionality, but without requiring the use or deployment of privileged init containers in every workload. Instead, istio-cni itself runs as a single privileged pod on the node. It uses this privilege to install a chained CNI plugin on the node, which is invoked after your “primary” interface CNI plugin. CNI plugins are invoked dynamically by Kubernetes as a privileged process on the host node whenever a new pod is created, and are able to configure pod networking.

The Istio chained CNI plugin always runs after the primary interface plugins, identifies user application pods with sidecars requiring traffic redirection, and sets up redirection in the Kubernetes pod lifecycle’s network setup phase, thereby removing the need for privileged init containers, as well as the requirement for NET_ADMIN and NET_RAW capabilities for users and pod deployments.

Prerequisites for use

1. Install Kubernetes with a correctly-configured primary interface CNI plugin. As supporting CNI plugins is required to implement the Kubernetes network model, you probably already have this if you have a reasonably recent Kubernetes cluster with functional pod networking.

   • AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and IBM Cloud IKS clusters have this capability.
   • Google Cloud GKE clusters have CNI enabled when any of the following features are enabled: network policy, intranode visibility, workload identity, pod security policy, or dataplane v2.
   • Kind has CNI enabled by default.
   • OpenShift has CNI enabled by default.

2. Install Kubernetes with the ServiceAccount admission controller enabled.

   • The Kubernetes documentation highly recommends this for all Kubernetes installations where ServiceAccounts are utilized.

Installing the CNI node agent

Install Istio with the istio-cni component

In most environments, a basic Istio cluster with the istio-cni component enabled can be installed using the following commands:

$ cat <<EOF > istio-cni.yaml
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
spec:
  components:
    cni:
      namespace: istio-system
      enabled: true
EOF
$ istioctl install -f istio-cni.yaml -y

$ helm install istio-cni istio/cni -n istio-system --wait

This will deploy an istio-cni DaemonSet into the cluster, which will create one Pod on every active node, deploy the Istio CNI plugin binary on each, and set up the necessary node-level configuration for the plugin. The CNI DaemonSet runs with system-node-critical PriorityClass. This is because it is the only means of actually reconfiguring pod networking to add them to the Istio mesh.

Note that if installing istiod with the Helm chart according to the Install with Helm guide, you must install istiod with the following extra override value, in order to disable the privileged init container injection:

$ helm install istiod istio/istiod -n istio-system --set pilot.cni.enabled=true --wait

Additional configuration

In addition to the above basic configuration there are additional configuration flags that can be set:

• values.cni.cniBinDir and values.cni.cniConfDir configure the directory paths to install the plugin binary and create plugin configuration.
• values.cni.cniConfFileName configures the name of the plugin configuration file.
• values.cni.chained controls whether to configure the plugin as a chained CNI plugin.

Normally, these do not need to be changed, but some platforms may use nonstandard paths. Please check the guidelines for your specific platform, if any, here.

Handling init container injection for revisions

When installing revisioned control planes with the CNI component enabled, values.pilot.cni.enabled=true needs to be set for each installed revision, so that the sidecar injector does not attempt inject the istio-init init container for that revision.

apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
spec:
  revision: REVISION_NAME
  ...
  values:
    pilot:
      cni:
        enabled: true
  ...

The CNI plugin at version 1.x is compatible with control plane at version 1.x-1, 1.x, and 1.x+1, which means CNI and control plane can be upgraded in any order, as long as their version difference is within one minor version.

Operating clusters with the CNI node agent installed

Upgrading

When upgrading Istio with in-place upgrade, the CNI component can be upgraded together with the control plane using one IstioOperator resource.

When upgrading Istio with canary upgrade, because the CNI component runs as a cluster singleton, it is recommended to operate and upgrade the CNI component separately from the revisioned control plane.

The following IstioOperator can be used to upgrade the CNI component independently.

apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
spec:
  profile: empty # Do not include other components
  components:
    cni:
      enabled: true
  values:
    cni:
      excludeNamespaces:
        - istio-system

This is not a problem for Helm as the istio-cni is installed separately, and can be upgraded via Helm:

$ helm upgrade istio-cni istio/cni -n istio-system --wait

Race condition & mitigation

The Istio CNI DaemonSet installs the CNI network plugin on every node. However, a time gap exists between when the DaemonSet pod gets scheduled onto a node, and the CNI plugin is installed and ready to be used. There is a chance that an application pod starts up during that time gap, and the kubelet has no knowledge of the Istio CNI plugin. The result is that the application pod comes up without Istio traffic redirection and bypasses Istio sidecar.

To mitigate the race between an application pod and the Istio CNI DaemonSet, an istio-validation init container is added as part of the sidecar injection, which detects if traffic redirection is set up correctly, and blocks the pod starting up if not. The CNI DaemonSet will detect and handle any pod stuck in such state; how the pod is handled is dependent on configuration described below. This mitigation is enabled by default and can be turned off by setting values.cni.repair.enabled to false.

This repair capability can be further configured with different RBAC permissions to help mitigate the theoretical attack vector detailed in ISTIO-SECURITY-2023-005. By setting the below fields to true/false as required, you can select the Kubernetes RBAC permissions granted to the Istio CNI.

Traffic redirection parameters

To redirect traffic in the application pod’s network namespace to/from the Istio proxy sidecar, the Istio CNI plugin configures the namespace’s iptables. You can adjust traffic redirection parameters using the same pod annotations as normal, such as ports and IP ranges to be included or excluded from redirection. See resource annotations for available parameters.

Compatibility with application init containers

The Istio CNI plugin may cause networking connectivity problems for any application init containers in sidecar data plane mode. When using Istio CNI, kubelet starts a pod with the following steps:

1. The default interface CNI plugin sets up pod network interfaces and assigns pod IPs.
2. The Istio CNI plugin sets up traffic redirection to the Istio sidecar proxy within the pod.
3. All init containers execute and complete successfully.
4. The Istio sidecar proxy starts in the pod along with the pod’s other containers.

Init containers execute before the sidecar proxy starts, which can result in traffic loss during their execution. Avoid this traffic loss with one of the following settings:

1. Set the uid of the init container to 1337 using runAsUser. 1337 is the uid used by the sidecar proxy. Traffic sent by this uid is not captured by the Istio’s iptables rule. Application container traffic will still be captured as usual.
2. Set the traffic.sidecar.istio.io/excludeOutboundIPRanges annotation to disable redirecting traffic to any CIDRs the init containers communicate with.
3. Set the traffic.sidecar.istio.io/excludeOutboundPorts annotation to disable redirecting traffic to the specific outbound ports the init containers use.

Compatibility with other CNIs

The Istio CNI plugin follows the CNI spec, and should be compatible with any CNI, container runtime, or other plugin that also follows the spec.

The Istio CNI plugin operates as a chained CNI plugin. This means its configuration is appended to the list of existing CNI plugins configurations. See the CNI specification reference for further details.

When a pod is created or deleted, the container runtime invokes each plugin in the list in order.

The Istio CNI plugin performs actions to set up the application pod’s traffic redirection - in the sidecar data plane mode, this means applying iptables rules in the pod’s network namespace to redirect in-pod traffic to the injected Istio proxy sidecar.