SPIRE (the SPIFFE Runtime Environment) is a toolchain of APIs for establishing trust between software systems across a wide variety of hosting platforms. SPIRE exposes the SPIFFE Workload API, which can attest running software systems and issue SPIFFE IDs and SVIDs to them. This in turn allows two workloads to establish trust between each other, for example by establishing an mTLS connection or by signing and verifying a JWT token. SPIRE can also enable workloads to securely authenticate to a secret store, a database, or a cloud provider service.
SPIRE is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation-level project. If you are an organization that wants to help shape the evolution of technologies that are container-packaged, dynamically-scheduled and microservices-oriented, consider joining the CNCF.
- Pre-built releases of SPIRE can be found at https://github.com/spiffe/spire/releases. These releases contain both SPIRE Server and SPIRE Agent binaries.
- Alternatively, you can build SPIRE from source.
- Before trying SPIRE, it's a good idea to learn about its architecture and design goals.
- Once ready to get started, see the Quickstart Guides for Kubernetes, Linux, and MacOS.
- There are several examples demonstrating SPIRE usage in the spire-examples and spire-tutorials repositories.
- Check ADOPTERS.md for a list of production SPIRE adopters, a view of the ecosystem, and use cases.
- See the SPIRE Roadmap for a list of planned features and enhancements.
- Join the SPIFFE community on Slack. If you have any questions about how SPIRE works, or how to get it up and running, the best places to ask questions are the SPIFFE Slack channels.
- Download the free book about SPIFFE and SPIRE, "Solving the Bottom Turtle."
- See Extend SPIRE to learn about the highly extensible SPIRE plugin framework.
- Client libraries for interacting with the SPIFFE Workload API are available in Go, Java and C++ languages. See SPIFFE Library Usage Examples for code samples.
- SPIRE provides an implementation of the Envoy Secret Discovery Service (SDS) for use with Envoy Proxy. SDS can be used to transparently install and rotate TLS certificates and trust bundles in Envoy. See Using SPIRE with Envoy for more information.
For supported integration versions, see Supported Integrations.
The SPIFFE community maintains the SPIRE project. Information on the various SIGs and relevant standards can be found in https://github.com/spiffe/spiffe.
- See CONTRIBUTING to get started.
- Use GitHub Issues to request features or file bugs.
- See GOVERNANCE for SPIFFE and SPIRE governance policies.
- The Scaling SPIRE guide covers design guidelines, recommendations, and deployment models.
- For an explanation of how SPIRE compares to related systems such as secret stores, identity providers, authorization policy engines and service meshes see comparisons.
A third party security firm (Cure53) completed a security audit of SPIFFE and SPIRE in February of 2021. Additionally, the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Security conducted two assessments on SPIFFE and SPIRE in 2018 and 2020. Please find the reports and supporting material, including the threat model exercise results, below.
- Cure53 Security Audit Report
- SIG-Security SPIFFE/SPIRE Security Assessment: summary
- SIG-Security SPIFFE/SPIRE Security Assessment: full assessment
- Scrutinizing SPIRE to Sensibly Strengthen SPIFFE Security
If you've found a vulnerability or a potential vulnerability in SPIRE please let us know at security@spiffe.io. We'll send a confirmation email to acknowledge your report, and we'll send an additional email when we've identified the issue positively or negatively.