Towards a Security Benchmark for the Architectural Design of Microservice Applications
Anusha Bambhore Tukaram, Simon Schneider, Nicolás E. Díaz Ferreyra, Georg Simhandl, Uwe Zdun, Riccardo Scandariato · Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security · 2022
The microservice architecture presents many challenges from a security perspective, due to the large amount of services, leading to an increased attack surface and an unmanageble cognitive load for security analysts. Several benchmarks exist to guide the secure configuration of the deployment infrastructure for microservice applications, including containers (e.g., Docker), orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes), cloud platforms (e.g., AWS), and even operating systems (e.g., Linux). In this paper we approach the creation of a benchmark for the design of the microservice applications themselves. To this aim, we inventorize a number of relevant security rules for the architectural design of microservice applications and assess (in a preliminary way) how these rules could be checked automatically.