How To Secure Microservices in a Multicloud Architecture
A microservices architecture allows each service to scale independently, making it flexible to scale without affecting the entire system.
Yet, while microservices have enhanced application quality and flexibility, they have also introduced unique risks. As a result, securing each individual microservice is essential to protect the overall architecture.
Security Challenges in Microservices Architecture
Securing a microservices architecture is particularly challenging due to its distributed nature and the complexity of managing multiple independent services.
Let’s look at six key challenges in building secure microservices and a few best practices.
1. A Larger, More Complex Attack Surface
In a monolith approach, there is one big codebase and one database, so security is mostly centralized. You can manage access, authentication and security protocols through a single gate, making it easier to handle.
However, in microservices architecture, you break it down into smaller Spring Boot applications. Each service now runs separately, communicates via APIs, and manages its own data and resources.
Each microservice has its own entry point, individual authentication and its security controls. Now every microservice requires security measures.
An attacker who finds a vulnerability in one service’s API could gain unauthorized access to other services, highlighting the challenges of securing such a distributed system.
2. DevOps Implementation
Let’s say you are an online education management platform and have a microservice for user management, one for courses and another for payments.
Microservices give the flexibility of faster development and deployment since they are managed by different teams. But this comes with a drawback.
Because the services are deployed separately and quickly, there’s a risk that proper security testing is skipped to meet tight deadlines.
For example, the payments service might be launched without thorough security checks, leaving it vulnerable to attacks once in production. This creates an environment where vulnerabilities are discovered too late, resulting in higher security risks.
3. Microservices Access Control
Let’s consider an e-commerce platform split into various microservices — inventory, customer and order processing. Implementing access control across these services is no cakewalk.
Security professionals have to ensure that only authorized users can access specific parts of the system, like customers viewing their order history or inventory managers updating stock levels.
This requires strict enforcement of access control at the API gateway for external users. Communication between microservices also needs to be secured following a zero trust principle, meaning no service should automatically trust another.
If there’s a policy change, like restricting admin access, you can’t just update it in one place as you would in a monolith. Instead, each microservice needs to be updated individually, making the process complex.
You can do it for maybe five or 10 microservices, but imagine if you have thousands of microservices. Maintaining consistent access control across the entire application can be a huge task.
4. Fault Tolerance in Microservices
In a traditional architecture, when one component fails, it’s simpler to pinpoint and resolve the issue because the system operates as a whole.
Microservices architecture involves numerous interconnected smaller services as shown below.
If one service fails, it can cascade into a bigger issue.
For example, if Microservice5 experiences downtime, the other services — whether directly or indirectly reliant on it — can also fail, causing widespread disruptions across the system.
Hence, teams need to focus on creating resilient services and handle failures effectively. This involves circuit breakers or retry mechanisms.
Keeping the entire system stable during failures requires constant monitoring and proactive measures. Hence you need a centralized microservices management and security platform managing fault tolerance across hundreds of services.
5. Caching in Microservices
Consider a large-scale social media platform using microservices for profile management, messaging and media uploads. To improve performance, caching stores frequently requested data like user profiles or message history, reducing repeated requests to microservices.
As the platform scales, caching becomes more complex. Thousands of users updating profiles and sending messages simultaneously create challenges in cache invalidation.
Additionally, maintaining cache coherence across microservices becomes critical, especially when multiple services rely on the same data.
For example, a profile service may store cached user information, but if the messaging service also relies on this data, both services need to coordinate when the cache is updated.
Microservices Security Best Practices
The following best practices can help you design security into your microservices applications and tackle application security challenges.
Secure Containers
Containers play a critical role in microservices. Since their containers are image-based, they possess potential security risks if not scanned properly. That’s why by focusing on container-level security, businesses can prevent potential breaches from spreading throughout their systems.
To ensure your containers are secure:
- Use scanning tools to ensure the image doesn’t possess vulnerabilities and deploy containers that are verified.
- Implementing runtime security to monitor container behavior strengthens protection.
Implement a Centralized API Gateway
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels once mentioned in 2014 that “APIs are the glue of the digital world.”
Fast forward 10 years and that holds true. An API gateway acts as the central hub, managing requests between external users and internal microservices. It not only simplifies microservice architecture but also enforces essential security measures such as authentication, authorization and traffic monitoring.
Microservices often operate across various networks, using different technologies and protocols. Securing them requires an API gateway, a single entry point where all clients connect. The gateway can handle authentication, authorization and filter requests, ensuring controlled access to sensitive resources.
Prioritize Microservice Isolation
In a microservices architecture, each service operates independently, allowing updates, maintenance and modifications without disrupting others.
This isolation should extend across infrastructure layers, including databases, ensuring no service can access another’s data. Full isolation prevents attackers from moving laterally within the system.
Protect Sensitive Data
Sensitive data, such as passwords or personal information, should never be exposed in plain text or storage. Users and automated systems can easily access this information making it vulnerable to threats.
Businesses should always remove or mask this information before storing it in any records. Practices like TLS/HTTPS or encrypting logs are not enough, since one caters to securing data in transit while the other secures data at rest. Hence, the best way is to stop storing sensitive information altogether.
Adopt a Zero Trust Security Model
Zero trust security works on the idea that no user or device should be trusted by default, whether inside or outside the network. By using the zero trust model, businesses can make sure every user and device is constantly authenticated and authorized, no matter where they are.
In microservices, this means checking every interaction between services, enforcing strict access controls and logging all actions. This approach limits the chances of attacks and reduces the risk of hackers moving across the network.
Role of Kubernetes in Microservice Security
Kubernetes offers robust security features designed to protect microservices-based applications. Here are the key features of Kubernetes that secure a microservice architecture:
- Role-based access control (RBAC): Kubernetes uses RBAC to ensure that only authorized users and services can access specific resources, enforcing the principle of least privilege and reducing unauthorized access risks.
- Network policies: Kubernetes provides granular control over pod communication, allowing you to define which services can interact. This isolation helps prevent security breaches from spreading within the cluster.
- Security and compliance: Kubernetes enhances the security of microservices and simplifies compliance with industry regulations, offering a more secure and resilient infrastructure.
- Layered security approach: Kubernetes provides protection against both internal and external threats, making it a critical tool for secure application deployment.
Conclusion
Microservices not only offer more flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency; they are also changing the way DevOps and development teams work. As the adoption of microservices increases, so is the need to secure them end to end.
That said, to fully secure these independent components, it’s important to equip your team with the right tools. AccuKnox offers end-to-end agentless security solutions that seamlessly integrate into your applications. This allows your team to concentrate on building scalable systems without the need to develop in-house security measures.
