Biblio

Containers technology radically changed the ways for packaging applications and deploying them as services in cloud environments. According to the recent report on security predictions of 2020 by Trend Micro, the vulnerabilities in container components deployed with cloud architecture have been one of the top security concerns for development and operations teams in enterprises. Docker is one of the leading container technologies that automate the deployment of applications into containers. Docker Hub is a public repository by Docker for storing and sharing the Docker images. These Docker images are pulled from the Docker Hub repository and the security of images being used from the repositories in any cloud environment could be at risk. Vulnerabilities in Docker images could have a detrimental effect on enterprise applications. In this paper, the focus is on securing the Docker images using vulnerability centric approach (VCA) to detect the vulnerabilities. A set of use cases compliant with the NIST SP 800-190 Application Container Security Guide is developed for audit compliance of Docker container images with the OWASP Container Security Verification Standards (CSVS). In this paper, firs vulnerabilities of Docker container images are identified and assessed using the VCA. Then, a set of use cases to identify presence of the vulnerabilities is developed to facilitate the security audit of the container images. Finally, it is illustrated how the proposed use cases can be mapped with the requirements of the OWASP Container Security Verification Standards. The use cases can serve as a security auditing tool during the development, deployment, and maintenance of cloud microservices applications.

Microservice Architectures (MSA) structure applications as a collection of loosely coupled services that implement business capabilities. The key advantages of MSA include inherent support for continuous deployment of large complex applications, agility and enhanced productivity. However, studies indicate that most MSA are homogeneous, and introduce shared vulnerabilites, thus vulnerable to multi-step attacks, which are economics-of-scale incentives to attackers. In this paper, we address the issue of shared vulnerabilities in microservices with a novel solution based on the concept of Moving Target Defenses (MTD). Our mechanism works by performing risk analysis against microservices to detect and prioritize vulnerabilities. Thereafter, security risk-oriented software diversification is employed, guided by a defined diversification index. The diversification is performed at runtime, leveraging both model and template based automatic code generation techniques to automatically transform programming languages and container images of the microservices. Consequently, the microservices attack surfaces are altered thereby introducing uncertainty for attackers while reducing the attackability of the microservices. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our solution, with an average success rate of over 70% attack surface randomization.