[WSO2 Integration Summit San Francisco 2019] Microservices Security Landscape
- WSO2 Team
- Content Writer - WSO2
The microservices architecture expands the attack surface with multiple microservices communicating with each other remotely. It’s a common principle in security that the strength of a given system is only as strong as the strength of its weakest link. Unlike in any other system design, the repercussions will be extremely high if we do not get right the security in a microservices design.The key driving force behind microservices architecture is the speed to production (or the time to market). One should be able to introduce a change to a service, test it and instantly deploy it into production.
A proper secure development lifecycle and test automation strategy is essential to make sure that we do not introduce security vulnerabilities at the code level. We need to have a proper plan for static code analysis and dynamic testing — and most importantly those tests should be part of the continuous delivery (CD) process. Any vulnerability should be identified early in the development lifecycle and should have shorter feedback cycles.
There are multiple microservices deployment patterns — but the most commonly used one is the service-per-host model. The host does not necessarily mean a physical machine — most probably it would be a container (Docker). DevOps security needs to worry about container-level security. How do we isolate a container from other containers and what level of isolation we have between the container and the host operating system? How do we authenticate and access control users to microservices and how do we secure the communication channels between microservices? All fall under application level security.
This talk addresses multiple perspectives in securing microservices: SDLC, DevOps, and application-level security.
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Prabath spent most of his time in the last ten years with the WSO2 IAM team, in developing the open source WSO2 Identity Server (Apache 2.0 license), which is used by hundreds of top companies globally, and also within the open source communities. As a technology evangelist, Prabath has published four books, including Advanced API Security. He has spoken at numerous conferences including RSAConference, Identiverse (Cloud Identity Summit), European Identity Conference (Keynote 2015), API World, API Strategy & Practice Con, OSCON and WSO2Con - and traveled the world conducting workshops in evangelizing WSO2 technologies.