Biblio

The service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer in a microservice architecture. It manages service-to-service communication within an application between decoupled or loosely coupled microservices (called services) without modifying their implementations. The service mesh includes APIs for security, traffic and policy management, and observability features. These features are enabled using a pre-defined configuration, which can be changed at runtime with human intervention. However, it has no autonomy to self-manage changes to the microservice application’s operational environment. A better configuration is one that can be customized according to environmental conditions during execution to protect the application from potential threats. This customization requires enabling self-protection mechanisms within the service mesh that evaluate the risk of environmental condition changes and enable appropriate configurations to defend the application from impending threats. In this paper, we design an assessment component into a service mesh that includes a security assurance case to define the threat model and dynamically assess the application given environment changes. We experiment with a demo application, Bookinfo, using an open-source service mesh platform, Istio, to enable self-protection. We consider certain parameters extracted from the service request as environmental conditions. We evaluate those parameters against the threat model and determine the risk of violating a security requirement for controlled and authorized information flow.

A service-based system (SBS) dynamically composes third-party services to deliver comprehensive functionality. As adaptive systems, SBSs can substitute equivalent services within the composition if service operations or workflow requirements change. Substituted services must maintain the original SBS quality of service (QoS) constraints. In this paper, we add security as a QoS constraint. Using a model problem of a SBS system created for self-adaptive system technology evaluation, we demonstrate the applicability of security assurance cases and service security profile exchange to build in security awareness for more informed SBS adaptation.

Certifying security controls is required for information systems that are either federally maintained or maintained by a US government contractor. As described in the NIST SP800-53, certified and accredited information systems are deployed with an acceptable security threat risk. Self-adaptive information systems that allow functional and decision-making changes to be dynamically configured at runtime may violate security controls increasing the risk of security threat to the system. Methods are needed to formalize the process of certification for security controls by expressing and verifying the functional and non-functional requirements to determine what risks are introduced through self-adaptation. We formally express the existence and behavior requirements of the mechanisms needed to guarantee the security controls' effectiveness using audit controls on program example. To reason over the risk of security control compliance given runtime self-adaptations, we use the KIV theorem prover on the functional requirements, extracting the verification concerns and workflow associated with the proof process. We augment the MAPE-K control loop planner with knowledge of the mechanisms that satisfy the existence criteria expressed by the security controls. We compare self-adaptive plans to assess their risk of security control violation prior to plan deployment.