Detection strategies for microservice security tactics

Microservice architectures are widely used today to implement distributed systems. Securing microservice architectures is challenging because of their polyglot nature, continuous evolution, and various security concerns relevant to such architectures. This article proposes a novel, model-based approach providing detection strategies to address the automated detection of security tactics (or patterns and best practices) in a given microservice architecture decomposition model. Our novel detection strategies are metrics-based rules that decide conformance to a security recommendation based on a statistical predictor. The proposed approach models this recommendation using Architectural Design Decisions (ADDs). We apply our approach for four different security-related ADDs on access management, traffic control, and avoiding plaintext sensitive data in the context of microservice systems. We then apply our approach to a model data set of 10 open-source microservice systems and 20 variants of those systems. Our results are detection strategies showing a very low bias, a very high correlation, and a low prediction error in our model data set.

Subjects

Authorization

Codes

Computer architecture

Conformance Checking

Data models

Detection Strategies

Measurement

Metrics

Microservice architectures

Microservice Architecture Security

Microservices

Security

DDC Class

600: Technology

Funding(s)

Assurance and certification in secure Multi-party Open Software and Services

Publication version

publishedVersion

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Name

Detection_Strategies_for_Microservice_Security_Tactics.pdf

Type

Main Article

Size

4.3 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Options

Detection strategies for microservice security tactics