agent-substrate / agent-substrate/substrate

CSI TLS verification lacks caching, causing performance degradation

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#1,182 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @ahmedtd View on GitHub
area/security area/storage kind/feature
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Description

## Expected Behavior
The TLS configuration verification in `resolveTLSConfig` should efficiently verify CA certificates during connection handshakes while maintaining the ability to detect and reload CA certificate rotations without impacting performance.

## Actual Behavior
The CA certificate verification logic in `resolveTLSConfig` currently reads the CA trust bundle from disk on every TLS connection handshake. This causes redundant disk I/O operations on each connection, which may impact performance and scalability.

The current implementation is acceptable for the initial implementation but has been identified as needing optimization before general availability (GA).

## Steps to Reproduce the Problem

1. Deploy CSI driver controller with TLS enabled via Pod Identity (PR #956)
2. Configure multiple ate-api instances making requests to the CSI controller
3. Monitor disk I/O and performance metrics during sustained load
4. Observe that CA certificate pool is re-read from disk on each TLS handshake

## Specifications

- **Version**: From PR #956 (identity: Secure CSI Driver TCP Connections via Pod Identity)
- **Component**: CSI Driver TLS Configuration
- **Related Files**:
- `internal/volume/csi/plugin.go` (function: `resolveTLSConfig`)
- **Related PR**: #956
- **Target Milestone**: M2 (pre-GA)

## Additional Context

The `resolveTLSConfig` function uses `VerifyConnection` to dynamically verify server certificates against the latest CA bundle read from disk on each handshake. While this ensures CA rotations are detected without process restart, it currently lacks a caching mechanism.

Implementation should:
- Cache the CA certificate pool to reduce disk I/O
- Maintain dynamic reload capability to detect CA certificate rotations
- Reference implementation: https://github.com/ahmedtd/tinycert/blob/main/lib/spiffefsd/spiffefsd.go

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