Securing microservices: challenges and best practices

Abstract

The research studies the security challenges and best practices in microservice architecture, emphasising the need for new security approaches due to their distributed nature. It reviews existing literature, highlighting the lack of comprehensive threat models and the predominance of theoretical over practical solutions. The authors propose a detailed threat model tailored for microservices, addressing unique challenges like inter-service communication and containerisation. The model includes specific attack vectors, sources, impact points, consequences, and mitigation strategies. The document underscores the importance of integrating academic and grey literature insights to develop effective security strategies for microservice architectures.