Building Microservices with Go

Confused deputy

The confused deputy problem is where one system can abuse the trust another system has and will execute a command that it would not ordinarily be allowed to do. Consider a system that issues refunds inside your system; you think that the system is safe, as it is a private API sitting behind your firewall, but what if an attacker manages to compromise your firewall? If they can detect that sending a POST request with a payload to a server will refund money to a bank or PayPal account then they do not even need to attempt to attack further into your infrastructure in order to get their payday. This scenario is all too common; when building systems, we place too much trust on the external defenses and run a principle of trust ...