Part 1 Overview
1 Microservices security landscape
1.1 How security works in a monolithic application
In most monolithic applications, security is enforced centrally, and individual components need not worry about carrying out additional checks unless there is a desperate requirement to do so. As a result, the security model of a monolithic application is much more straightforward than that of an application built around microservices architecture.
1.2 Challenges of securing microservices
Mostly because of the inherent nature of microservices architecture, security is challenging.
1.2.1 The broader the attack surface, the higher the risk of attack
1.2.2 Distributed security screening may result in poor performance
These repetitive, distributed security checks and remote connections could contribute heavily to latency and considerably degrade the performance of the system.
1.2.3 Deployment complexities make bootstrapping trust among microservices a nightmare
Managing a large-scale microservices deployment with thousands of services would be extremely challenging if you didn’t know how to automate.
Fortunately, things didn’t happen that way, and that’s why we believe that microservices and containers are a match made in heaven. Microservices and containers (Docker) were born at the right time to complement each other nicely.
1.2.4 Requests spanning multiple microservices are harder to trace
Observability is a measure of what you can infer about the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. Logs, metrics, and traces are known as the three pillars of observability.
1.2.5 Immutability of containers challenges how you maintain service
credentials and access-control policies
The whole purpose of expecting servers to be immutable in a microservices
deployment is to make deployment clean and simple. At any point, you can kill a running container and create a new one with the base configuration without worrying about runtime data. （ scale horizontally easier）
1.2.6 The distributed nature of microservices makes sharing
user context harder
The challenge is to build trust between two microservices so that the receiving microservice accepts the user context passed from the calling microservice.
1.2.7 Polyglot architecture demands more security expertise
on each development team
In a multiteam environment, in which each team develops its own set of microservices, each team has the flexibility to pick the optimal technology stack for its requirements. This architecture, which enables the various
components in a system to pick the technology stack that is best for them, is known as a polyglot architecture.
A polyglot architecture makes security challenging. Because different teams use different technology stacks for development, each team has to have its own security experts.
1.3 Key security fundamentals
How much you should worry about security isn’t only a technical decision, but also an economic decision. The level of security you need depends on the assets you intend to protect.
1.3.1 Authentication protects your system against spoofing
1.3.2 Integrity protects your system from data tampering
Systems protected for integrity don’t ignore this possibility; they introduce measures so that if a message is altered, the recipient can detect and discard the request. The most common way to protect a message for integrity is to sign it.
Along with the data in transit, the data at rest must be protected for integrity. Of all your business data, audit trails matter most for integrity checks.
One way is to periodically calculate the message digests of audit trails, encrypt them, and store them securely.
1.3.3 Nonrepudiation: Do it once, and you own it forever
Nonrepudiation is an important aspect of information security that prevents you from denying anything you’ve done or committed.
Even in the digital world, a signature helps you achieve nonrepudiation; in this case, you use a digital signature.
You also need to make sure that you record transactions along with the timestamp and the signature—and maintain those records for a considerable amount of time.
1.3.4 Confidentiality protects your systems from unintended information disclosure
1.3.5 Availability: Keep the system running, no matter what
1.3.6 Authorization: Nothing more than you’re supposed to do
Authentication helps you learn about the user or the requesting party. Authorization
determines the actions that an authenticated user can perform on the system.
1.4 Edge security
1.4.1 The role of an API gateway in a microservices deployment
APIs have also become many companies’ main revenue-generation channel. The key role of the API gateway in a microservices deployment is to expose a selected set of microservices to the outside world as APIs and build quality-of-service (QoS) features. These QoS features are security, throttling, and analytics.
1.4.2 Authentication at the edge
Certificate-based authentication protects an API at the edge with mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS).
OAuth 2.0, which is an authorization framework for delegated access control, is the recommended approach for protecting APIs when one system wants to access an API on behalf of another system or a user.
1.4.3 Authorization at the edge
In addition to figuring out who the requesting party is during the authentication process, the API gateway could enforce corporatewide access-control policies, which are probably coarse-grained. More fine-grained access-control policies are enforced at the service level by the microservice itself .
1.4.4 Passing client/end-user context to upstream microservices
But you need a way to protect the communication channels between the gateway and the corresponding microservice, as well as a way to pass the initial client/user context.
User context carries basic information about the end user, and client context carries information about the client application. This information probably could be used by upstream microservices for service-level access control.
You have a couple of options: pass the user context in an HTTP header, or create a JWT with the user data. The first option is straightforward but raises some trust concerns when the first microservice passes the same user context in an HTTP header to another microservice. The second microservice doesn’t have any guarantee that the
user context isn’t altered. But with JWT, you have an assurance that a man in the middle can’t change its content and go undetected, because the issuer of the JWT signs it.
1.5 Securing service-to-service communication
The security model that you develop to protect service-to-service communication should consider the communication channels that cross trust boundaries, as well as how the actual communication takes place between microservices: synchronously or asynchronously.
In most cases, synchronous communication happens over HTTP.
Asynchronous communication can happen over any kind of messaging system.
1.5.1 Service-to-service authentication
You have three common ways to secure communications among services in a microservices deployment: trust the network, mTLS, and JWTs.
The trust-the-network approach is an old-school model in which no security is enforced in service-to-service communication; rather, the model relies on network-level security .
Mutual TLS , in fact, this method is the most common form of authentication used today. Each microservice in the deployment has to carry a public/private key pair and uses that key pair to authenticate to the recipient microservices via mTLS.
Unlike mTLS, JWT works at the application layer, not at the transport layer. JWT is a container that can carry a set of claims from one place to another.
1.5.2 Service-level authorization
Two approaches are used to enforce authorization at the service level: the centralized policy decision point (PDP) model and the embedded PDP model.
This method creates a lot of dependency on the PDP and also increases the latency because of the cost of calling the remote PDP endpoint. In some cases, the effect on latency can be prevented by caching policy decisions at the service level, but other than cache expiration time, there’s no way to communicate policy update events to the service. In practice, policy
updates happen less frequently, and cache expiration may work in most cases.
The challenge with embedded PDPs is how to get policy updates
from the centralized policy administration point (PAP).
1.5.3 Propagating user context among microservices
When one microservice invokes another microservice, it needs to carry both the enduser identity and the identity of the microservice itself. When one microservice authenticates to another microservice with mTLS or JWT, the identity of the calling microservice can be inferred from the embedded credentials.
There are three common ways to pass the end-user context from one microservice to another microservice:
Send the user context as an HTTP header.
Use a JWT.
Use a JWT issued by an external STS that is trusted by all the microservices in the deployment. （ This is the most secure approach. ）
1.5.4 Crossing trust boundaries
In terms of security, when one microservice talks to another microservice, and both microservices are in the same trust domain, each microservice may trust one STS in the same domain or a certificate authority in the same domain. Based on this trust, the recipient microservice can validate a security token sent to it by a calling microservice. Typically, in a single trust domain, all the microservices trust one STS and accept only security tokens issued by that STS.
Summary
Securing microservices is quite challenging with respect to securing a monolithic application, mostly because of the inherent nature of the microservices architecture.
A microservices security design starts by defining a process to streamline development and engage security-scanning tools to the build system, so that we can discover the code-level vulnerabilities at a very early stage in the development cycle.
We need to worry about edge security of a microservices deployment and securing communications among microservices.
Edge security is about authenticating and authorizing requests coming into the microservices deployment from client applications, at the edge, probably with an API gateway.
Securing communications among microservices is the most challenging part.We discussed multiple techniques in this chapter, and which you choose will depend on many factors, such as the level of security, the type of communication (synchronous or asynchronous), and trust boundaries.
2 First steps in securing microservices
2.1 Building your first microservice
2.1.1 Downloading and installing the required software
INSTALLING THE JDK
INSTALLING APACHE MAVEN
INSTALLING CURL
INSTALLING THE GIT COMMAND-LINE TOOL
2.1.2 Clone samples repository
git clone https://github.com/microservices-security-in-action/samples.git
2.1.3 Compiling the Order Processing microservice
mvn clean install
mvn spring-boot:run
2.1.4 Accessing the Order Processing microservice
2.1.5 What is inside the source code directory?
Often, a resource represents an object or entity that you intend to inspect or manipulate. When mapped to HTTP, a resource is usually identified by a request URI, and an action is represented by an HTTP method;
2.1.6 Understanding the source code of the microservice
2.2 Setting up an OAuth 2.0 server
2.2.1 The interactions with an authorization server
It’s recommended that the client communicate with the microservice over HTTPS and send the token in an HTTP header instead of a query parameter. Because query parameters are sent in the URL, those can be recorded in server logs. Hence, anyone who has access to the logs can see this information.
2.2.2 Running the OAuth 2.0 authorization server
2.2.3 Getting an access token from the OAuth 2.0 authorization server
2.2.4 Understanding the access token response
{
“access_token”:”8c017bb5-f6fd-4654-88c7-c26ccca54bdd”,
“token_type”:”bearer”,
“expires_in”:300,
“scope”:”read write”
}
2.3 Securing a microservice with OAuth 2.0
2.3.1 Security based on OAuth 2.0
2.3.2 Running the sample
2.4 Invoking a secured microservice from a client application
curl -v http://localhost:8080/orders \
-H ‘Content-Type: application/json’ \
-H “Authorization: Bearer b9a405cf-b4e2-4be8-aa25-19475d8993b1” \
–data-binary @- << EOF
{
“items”:[
{
“itemCode”:”IT0001″,
“quantity”:3
},
{
“itemCode”:”IT0004″,
“quantity”:1
}
],
“shippingAddress”:”No 4, Castro Street, Mountain View, CA, USA”
}
EOF
2.5 Performing service-level authorization with OAuth 2.0 scopes
A privilege describes the actions you’re permitted to perform on a resource.
More often than not, your role or roles in an organization describe which actions you’re permitted to perform within that organization and which actions you’re not permitted to perform. A privilege may also indicate status or credibility.
Likewise, a privilege is an indication of the level of access that a user or an application possesses in a system.
In the world of OAuth 2.0, privilege is mapped to a scope. A scope is way of
abstracting a privilege. A privilege can be a user’s role, membership status, credibility, or something else. It can also be a combination of a few such attributes. You use scopes to abstract the implication of a privilege. A scope declares the privilege required by a calling client application to grant access to a resource.
2.5.1 Obtaining a scoped access token from the authorization server
curl -u orderprocessingservice:orderprocessingservicesecret \
-H “Content-Type: application/json” \
-d ‘{ “grant_type”: “client_credentials”, “scopes”: “read write” }’ \
http://localhost:8085/oauth/token
2.5.2 Protecting access to a microservice with OAuth 2.0 scopes
{
“error”:”insufficient_scope”,
“error_description”:”Insufficient scope for this resource”,
“scope”:”write”
}
Summary
OAuth 2.0 is an authorization framework, which is widely used in securing microservices deployments at the edge.
OAuth 2.0 supports multiple grant types. The client credentials grant type, which we used in this chapter, is used mostly for system-to-system authentication.
Each access token issued by an authorization server is coupled with one or more scopes. Scopes are used in OAuth 2.0 to express the privileges attached to an access token.
OAuth 2.0 scopes are used to protect and enforce access-control checks in certain operations in microservices.
All samples in this chapter used HTTP (not HTTPS) endpoints to spare you
from having to set up proper certificates and to make it possible for you to
inspect messages being passed on the wire (network), if required. In production systems, we do not recommend using HTTP for any endpoint.
