Certificate

Microservices communicate over the network dozens or hundreds of times per second. Without mutual authentication, any compromised pod inside your cluster can impersonate a legitimate service, intercept traffic, or make unauthorized calls. mTLS (mutual TLS) closes this gap by requiring both ends of every connection to present a valid X.509 certificate — no certificate, no connection. This guide covers mTLS from first principles through production deployment: how the handshake works, enabling it in Istio, automating certificate lifecycle with cert-manager, implementing SPIFFE/SPIRE workload identity, and debugging the errors you’ll inevitably encounter. ...

The PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target error is one of the most common issues when deploying ForgeRock Directory Services (DS) in production. It means the Java runtime cannot verify the TLS certificate chain — and until you fix it, LDAPS connections, replication, and AM-to-DS communication will all fail. Clone the companion repo: All diagnostic and fix scripts from this guide are available at IAMDevBox/forgerock-ds-cert-troubleshoot. Clone it, configure config.env, and run ./scripts/diagnose.sh ds.example.com 1636 for instant diagnosis. ...