Towards Secure and Leak-Free Workflows Using Microservice Isolation

Abstract

Companies like Netflix increasingly use the cloud to deploy their business processes. Those processes often involve partnerships with other companies, and can be modeled as workflows. This shift towards the cloud environment has led to more and more data leaks and breaches, resulting in huge losses of money for businesses like the movie industry, as well as a loss of user privacy for businesses dealing with user data like the pharmaceutical industry.In this paper, we show how those workflows can be enforced while preventing data exposure. Following the principles of zerotrust, we develop an infrastructure using the isolation provided by a microservice architecture, to enforce owner policy. We show that our infrastructure is resilient to the set of attacks considered in our security model. We implement a simple, yet realistic, workflow with our infrastructure in a publicly available proof of concept. We then verify that the specified policy is correctly enforced by testing the deployment for policy violations, and estimate the overhead cost of authorization.

Securing Workflows Using Microservices and Metagraphs

“…This work is merges and extends two of our previous papers [4,5] published in the IEEE 22nd International Conference on High-Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR 2021) conference. The contributions of our paper are as follows:…”

“…To solve this issue, we aim to achieve a secure system enabling the exchange of data between non-trusted agents in the context of workflows. To this end, we combine two of our previous works [4,5] in this work. The first one describes an infrastructure to deploy a workflow securely in the cloud using microservices and how to verify the implemented policy is enforced, while the second details a way to verify the implementation of the policy corresponds to its specification.…”

Avoiding Excessive Data Exposure Through Microservice APIs

“…Similar to our research, they consider inter-service communication a critical security aspect. A more datacentric security approach is pursued by Miller et al [2], where the authors argue that leaking data can pose an enormous financial risk for companies and accordingly present a security architecture to prevent these data exposures while still enforcing the required business workflows. Shu et al [14] introduce a method to detect sensitive data exposure in microservice systems by preserving data privacy.…”

“…They are actively developed and utilize many best-practices implementations used among other systems. Several authors have also identified data leaks and breaches as a significant problem in microservice architectures (see, for instance, [2,6] or [14]). Therefore, our research provides a significant contribution to reducing the damage caused by these leaks.…”

“…Despite their main principles like autonomy and isolation, microservices often have to cooperate and interchange data to fulfill their tasks [1]. These interservice communications mainly consist of domain-specific information required to execute particular tasks that might include user-related or other sensitive data [2]. While business-related information can be of high interest for malicious competitors, it is especially the sensitive data that presents a lucrative target for external attackers intent on either stealing or compromising the information [3].…”