Securing Microservices and Microservice Architectures: A Systematic Mapping Study
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Microservice architectures are becoming trending alternatives to existing software development paradigms notably for developing complex and distributed applications. Microservices emerged as an architectural design pattern aiming to address the scalability and ease the maintenance of online services. However, security breaches also increased threatening the availability, integrity and confidentiality of microservice-based systems. A growing body of literature is found addressing security threats and security mechanisms to individual microservices and microservice architectures. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study in order to categorize threats on microservice architectures and security proposals along with their applicability levels, platforms and validation techniques. The aim of this study is to provide a helpful guide to developers about already recognized threats on microservices and how they can be detected, mitigated or prevented; we also aim to identify potential research gaps on securing microservice architectures. The systematic search yielded 1067 studies of which 47 are selected as primary studies. The results of the mapping revealed an unbalanced research focus on external attacks, authentication and authorization techniques compared with internal attacks and mitigation techniques. Additionally, we found that microservice layer is the most addressed layer in the architecture. We also found that performance analysis and case studies are the most used validation technique of security proposals.
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