Workload

SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) is a CNCF graduated specification that defines a standard for workload identity: a universal answer to the question “how does a service prove who it is to another service, without a human provisioning a secret?” The core primitives are simple. A SPIFFE ID is a URI of the form spiffe://trust-domain/path that unambiguously names a workload within a trust domain — for example spiffe://prod.example.com/payments/api. A SVID (SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document) is a cryptographically signed document asserting that SPIFFE ID, in one of two forms: an X.509-SVID, which is a standard X.509 certificate with the SPIFFE ID encoded in the Subject Alternative Name field (used for mTLS), or a JWT-SVID, which is a short-lived JWT bearing the SPIFFE ID as the sub claim (used for service-to-service authentication where TLS termination is handled elsewhere). A trust bundle is the set of CA certificates for a trust domain that relying parties use to validate SVIDs — analogous to a root CA store, but scoped to a SPIFFE trust domain. The Workload API is the local gRPC API through which a workload retrieves its SVID and the trust bundles of domains it needs to communicate with, with automatic rotation before expiry.