Microservices and Container Security

Using containers and microservices can help you deliver flexible and resilient software. However, it’s crucial to ensure cybersecurity when using such technologies.

In the post below, we overview the basics of containers and microservices security.

What are containers?

Containers and microservices are popular approaches to application development, especially for complex solutions.

Containerization is a form of virtualization that enables you to run applications in isolated spaces called containers that use the same shared operating system (OS). While virtualization allows for running multiple OSs on the hardware of a single physical server, containerization allows you to deploy multiple applications using the same OS on a single virtual machine or server.

Containers, also known as application containers or server application containers, are executable units of software that contain application code along with its libraries and dependencies. Developers prefer to go with a container-based architecture because containers are lightweight, portable, and easy to maintain and scale.

What are microservices?

A microservices architecture, or simply microservices, is an architectural approach to application development in which a single application is composed of many small, autonomous services.

Microservices are independently deployable, which allows you to improve application code, add new features, and scale each service much more easily than in a monolithic architecture. Each service represents a separate codebase, so it can be managed by a small development team. A microservices architecture simplifies the process of creating and maintaining complex applications, but is not suitable for small applications.

Microservices are loosely coupled, so if one service fails, the rest keep working, improving the fault tolerance of the entire application. Moreover, they support polyglot programming, which means that services don’t need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.

Security challenges of applications based on containers and microservices

As with any other approach, both containers and microservices can bring certain security challenges to application development. And to ensure proper cybersecurity of your product, it’s essential to be aware of the most common security risks and plan how to prevent and mitigate them.

1. Vulnerabilities that can be exploited

• Image vulnerabilities are the most common security threats within applications based on microservices and containers. They typically arise from insecure libraries or other dependencies.
• Application vulnerabilities might appear from flaws inside the app’s source code. For example, if one of your applications has a buffer overflow vulnerability, attackers might exploit it to execute malicious code and take over your container.
• Vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. Microservices-based applications are more complex than monolithic applications, as they consist of many moving parts. It makes the microservices-based application quite vulnerable to cyber attacks because it’s hard to ensure proper security of that many components.

2. Malware risks

• Hackers gain access to a container and inject malicious code into it that can also attack a microservice within this container, other containers, or the host operating system.
• A malicious actor compromises your CI/CD environment and injects malware into the source code repositories that are used to build container images.
• Attackers breach the container registry and replace images with ones that contain malware.
• Hackers trick developers into downloading malicious container images from external sources.

3. Risks related to access to code

• Too broad of access rights. Many development companies choose the DevOps approach for building applications using microservices and containers because it breaks down the barriers between teams and ensures continuous integration and continuous deployment.
• Weak secrets management. Even more people can get access to containers in case of poor security practices or security rules violations.

4. Unrestricted communication between containers

Usually, containers can’t access any resources outside of the environment they directly control — this is called unprivileged mode. Engineers should only allow communication capabilities between containers that are necessary for correct application work. For example, an application container might make a connection to a database container. Whenever a container has more privileges than is strictly required, it can cause additional security risks.

5. Managing data securely

The distributed framework of a microservices architecture makes it more challenging to secure data because it’s difficult to control access and secure authorization to individual services. Thus, engineers have to pay more attention to how their application ensures data confidentiality, privacy, and integrity within each service.

6. Choosing and configuring tools

When developing and maintaining a microservices architecture, DevOps teams use lots of tools, including open-source and third-party. While such tools help engineers achieve the efficiency needed for DevOps pipelines, they don’t always provide the required security.

If you don’t carefully assess the security capabilities of open-source tools you plan to integrate into your environment, you risk creating vulnerabilities within microservices and containers. And even if a tool seems secure enough, you still should be careful when configuring its settings and keep evaluating the tool’s security with time.

11 best practices for securing microservices and containers

The practices we mention below can be a helpful addition to secure your current way of developing applications using containers and microservices.

We’ve covered each of these methods in a full article in our blog. Explore this article to learn more details on how to secure your project when using microservices and containers.

Final thoughts

A comprehensive security program for microservices-based software should address the entire application lifecycle. At Apriorit, we have dedicated teams with experience in cloud computing, cybersecurity projects, and security testing ready to help you boost microservices security capabilities as well as build high-quality and secure containerized solutions of any complexity.

If you are interested in more details on this topic, check out the full article in our blog. It describes the best practices for improving the security of your project when using containers and microservices.