Trusted Microservices: A Security Framework for Users' Interaction with Microservices Applications

Abstract

Microservices architecture emerges as a promising software design approach that provides large scale soft-ware systems with flexibility, scalability and fault tolerance. Moreover, it is considered a suitable design to be implemented using software containers provided with several cloud providers. However, microservices suffer from several security challenges that hinder its progress. The concept of microservices is to break down the system functionality to a number of small coherent services. Hence, using microservices as a design approach increases the security risks by expanding the risk surface. In contrast to microservices, monolithic applica-tions are implemented as a bulk of codes using single programming language. Such environment has several drawbacks related to flexibility and maintainability, but limits security issues. On the other hand, microservices implementation uses several programming languages and frameworks to implement small units of system func-tionality. Such environment opens the door to new critical security issues. The proposed work introduces the problem of securing microservices and provides a novel approach to protect microservices applications from masquerade attacks. The proposed framework also provides high protection to users from malicious services. The framework was implemented using 150 software containers to define users' HTTP requests and a set of 20 microservices were tested to proof its applicability and benefits.

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• microservices architecture
• monolithic applications
• malicious services
• masquerade attacks