Next-Generation Authentication and Authorization Models for Secure Financial Microservices APIs: Challenges, Innovations, and Best Practices
Bhushan Chaudhari, Santhosh Chitraju Gopal Verma, Srinivasa Rao Somu · INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CURRENT SCIENCE · 2024
The growing usage of microservices architectures in the financial industry has led to the necessity for sophisticated security models to protect distributed APIs and critical customer data. Standard authentication and authorization mechanisms, which are conceived for monolithic applications, are not very effective in handling the dynamic, scalable, and decentralized nature of microservices. This paper discusses Next-Generation Authentication and Authorization (NGA) models designed for secure financial microservices APIs. It identifies the inadequacy of legacy approaches and describes contemporary innovations, such as SIP-based challenge-response mechanisms, Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols, e.g., J-PAKE, and cloud native frameworks such as OpenID Connect, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Security issues like secret management, container vulnerabilities and service-to-service trust are explored together with best practices and implementation. The study advocates for a staged migration from monoliths, hybridized with the Zero Trust principles, identity-aware proxies, and cryptographic protocols to enable the secure, scalable, and resilient financial ecosystems.