Security Challenges With Microservices And Their Resolutions

While many organizations are adopting microservices because of their incredible benefits, there are still some security challenges associated with them. It is important to pay attention to these issues to ensure the data privacy and security system remains up when required. Architects and engineers are facing the security challenges that come with microservices.

Microservices security is a complex topic that needs to be tackled carefully. Microservices architectures offer scalability, availability, and resilience benefits but it all comes at the cost of security. In this blog, we are talking about some of the mysteries of microservice security with its solutions and best practices that need to be adopted when building microservice-based applications.

What is Microservice Security?

Microservices are small, autonomous services responsible for supporting a single function in the application and collaborating with other microservices. It has an efficient design pattern through which organizations can rapidly deliver high-quality applications. Microservices enable modification of one service without disturbing the other services in the applications. Cloud-native technologies such as serverless functions and containers are commonly used for developing Microservices applications. There are various benefits associated with an application built with multiple and distributed components, but it also leads to security concerns that are completely different from traditional monolithic applications.

Key Challenges with Microservices Security

Let’s have a look at the key challenges of microservices that make it difficult to secure modern applications:-

• Multi-Cloud Deployments and Infrastructure Design

Microservices are distributed on different ports, which increases the chances of surface attack. It is not easy to configure the microservices to communicate with the external world. When it comes to microservices-based applications, each Microservices will connect with another one via well-defined APIs, which ultimately makes the APIs vulnerable in terms of security as well as increases the attack surface. To resolve these security issues, you need a secured API or application communication interface to ensure better security.

• Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance is an application capability to continue the work in cases of one or more component failures. It is more complex to implement fault tolerance in microservices-based applications as compared to monolithic applications. Services should have the ability to cope with service failures and other timeouts. If such a service failure accumulates, it will have an impact on other services in the application and result in clustered failures. Therefore, your services need fault-tolerance, which will allow them to cope with service failures. Otherwise, it can destabilize your entire application.

• DevOps

The development and operations teams need to work closely and interact well to make a successful microservice architecture in an organization. They should have a thorough understanding of the processes involved and the security risks that can be mitigated. Building an application contains different stages, including developing, deploying, and managing services, which are independent of each other. But the security issues occur when the applications are released without thorough testing. Microservices-based applications get frequent releases, which increases agility but at the cost of security. The frequent development of applications may not be properly tested before being released.

• Logging Has Become Ineffective

Logging monolithic applications is an old method that has been used for a long time. But this traditional method of logging does not work with microservice-based applications. It is because Microservices-based applications have autonomous, stateless, and distributed services that have been developed on heterogeneous technologies. It is important that your application should be able to aggregate the logs and correlate the events across multiple platforms and services to ensure effective logging.

Best Practices For Securing Microservices

Here we are sharing some best practices that can support improving your microservices application security.

• Use an API Gateway

Microservices-based applications consist of several different networks and use multiple technologies, protocols, and interfaces. As you are required to show your services to clients to avail them, these services are prone to security attacks. One of the best ways to prevent microservices is to create a single secured entry point through which all external systems and clients can get access in a secure manner. The entry point is called an API gateway. With this system, all clients will be connected through an API gateway, which you can use to perform authentication and authorization and also filter requests for sensitive resources. The API gateway works like a security layer between client apps and your microservice infrastructure. The API gateway also provides additional security benefits such as protocol conversion, monitoring, SSL termination, and more.

• Container Security

Microservices applications are generally based on container technology. Containers are based on images, which are prone to security risks. Therefore, regular scanning of containers is recommended to make sure that all images are secured and free from other security risks.

• Isolation

Isolation is a key component of the microservices architecture. Each service in the microservice architecture is a separate and isolated part of the application. A microservice-based application’s services should be built, deployed, scaled, tested, and managed separately without affecting any other microservices. A Microservice generally maintains its own set of data as a result, if any microservice is compromised, it will not be able to access the data of any other microservice. By maintaining isolation at all layers, if any microservice fails, it won’t be able to bring down other microservices in the application.

• Use Defense-in-Depth

It is a strategy that applies several security layers to your application’s data and services. This will provide a strong security system that makes it extremely difficult for hackers to crack this multi-layer security for your application. The system is equipped with multiple layers of security like anti-virus, firewall, and more. The key to a defense-in-depth strategy is to protect your entire application against potential attacks. The method entails identifying the sensitive services and applying the necessary security layers to them.

Wrapping Up

Microservices provide various benefits, including faster development, increased scalability, quick time to market, and loosely coupled architectures. But still, there are numerous challenges that come with Microservices that need to be resolved successfully. One of them is Microservices security, which should be addressed properly so that the benefits of microservices are not jeopardized. Are you struggling to create a secure microservice architecture? If so, then you should approach professional Microservices Architecture Development experts like Ksolves. You contact us to share your project details and our professionals will provide you with the best Microservices security implementation solutions to accomplish your key needs.