With Great Abstraction Comes Great Responsibility: Sealing the Microservices Attack Surface

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Presented at IEEESecDev 2019 by

Chien-an Chen

While the IT industry is embracing the cloud-nativetechnologies, migrating from monolithic architecture to serviceoriented architecture is not a trivial process. It involves a lot ofdissection and abstraction. The layer of abstraction designed forsimplifying the development quickly becomes the barrier of visibility and the source of misconfigurations. The complexity maygive microservices a larger attack surface compared to monolithicapplications. This talk presents a microservices threat modelingthat uncovers the attack vectors hidden in each abstraction layer.Scenarios of security breaches in microservices platforms arediscussed, followed by the countermeasures to close these attackvectors. Finally, a decision-making process for architecting securemicroservices is presented.