Protecting APIs in Financial Services with Zero Trust Overlay Mesh Networks

As a senior software developer in the financial services industry knows, protecting APIs from cyber threats and attacks is critical. A cutting-edge approach to a robust security solution is embedding the principles of zero-trust networking directly into your application, making your app immediately secure by design. This approach embeds key principles of zero trust: end-to-end encryption, continual authorization, authorize before connect, least-privilege access, directly into your application itself by adopting an OpenZiti SDK. OpenZiti also provides a secure, zero trust overlay mesh usable not just for securing your applications but also for secure connectivity to other data centers and users alike, all without opening holes in your firewalls.

This talk will review the three components of OpenZiti's architecture: controller, edge routers, and SDKs in addition to diving into the internal physical and logical architecture of OpenZiti. We will learn what SPIFFE and SPIRE are and demonstrate how to integrate OpenZiti with SPIRE. Adopting a zero-trust overlay is the next evolution of security, moving beyond TLS and mTLS into a zero-trust-enabled architecture suitable for secure financial transactions. This presentation will feature code written in Go and CLI commands to demonstrate how to configure the OpenZiti overlay mesh.