Moving from a monolithic application to a microservices application puts us in a very interesting position
as far as security is concerned. Where the monolith provided a natural
security perimeter at the edge of its process, a microservices application has no
natural security perimeter at all. Sensitive information that was previously
protected by being passed in a function call inside the process now has to be
sent over the network, as shown in Figure 7-1.
Figure 7-1. Security stance in a monolithic versus a microservices application
Additionally, the microservices are often running on infrastructure and
network resources provided by outside teams, organizations, or even companies.
If nothing is done to counter the threat, it’s all too easy for an attacker
with access to the network to read, intercept, and modify
communications between microservices. This is obviously a serious problem.
Finally, the network doesn’t even provide any secure way for a given
microservice to know who made a call to it. The called microservice can find out
the caller’s IP and MAC addresses, but these aren’t actually secure—it’s
very easy to spoof the sender’s IP address, for example. Things just get
worse when the application is running on a network it doesn’t control.
Secure Communications
To allow any microservices application to work, we need secure communications ...
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