Securing AWS Lambda: Advanced Strategies and Best Practices
Amine Barrak, Gildas Fofe, Léo Mackowiak, Emmanuel Kouam, Fehmi Jaafar · 2024
The emergence of the serverless paradigm, embodied by AWS Lambda functions, has revolutionized the landscape of cloud computing. This model empowers users to offload server management tasks, allowing them to focus their efforts on core business logic while achieving substantial cost savings. However, this transition to serverless exposes significant vulnerabilities, especially in terms of security. This article delves into the specific security challenges associated with AWS Lambda functions, with a focus on major threats such as malicious code injection, sensitive data leaks, DDoS attacks, excessive privileges, vulnerable dependencies, and certificate issues. Our investigation, centered around the AWS Lambda platform, thoroughly analyzes these challenges by identifying underlying mechanisms and inherent risks. We review the state of the art solutions from the literature while examining the strategies adopted by AWS and the industry to enhance security. By implementing these solutions on an AWS server, we concretely illustrate possible protective measures. In this paper, we aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of security issues in the context of Lambda functions, paving the way for recommendations and research directions to bolster the resilience of this essential serverless cloud technology.