draft-ietf-wimse-http-signature

WIMSE Workload-to-Workload Authentication with HTTP Signatures

streamIETF groupwimse stateactive pages19 rev03 expires2026-10-09 canonicalhttps://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wimse-http-signature/
The WIMSE architecture defines authentication and authorization for software workloads in a variety of runtime environments, from the most basic ones to complex multi-service, multi-cloud, multi-tenant deployments. This document defines one of the mechanisms to provide workload authentication, using HTTP Signatures. While only applicable to HTTP traffic, the protocol provides end-to-end protection of requests (and optionally, responses), even when service traffic is not end-to-end encrypted, that is, when TLS proxies and load balancers are used. Authentication is based on the Workload Identity Token (WIT).