Biblio

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.

In this paper, we propose techniques for combating source selective jamming attacks in tactical cognitive MANETs. Secure, reliable and seamless communications are important for facilitating tactical operations. Selective jamming attacks pose a serious security threat to the operations of wireless tactical MANETs since selective strategies possess the potential to completely isolate a portion of the network from other nodes without giving a clear indication of a problem. Our proposed mitigation techniques use the concept of address manipulation, which differ from other techniques presented in open literature since our techniques employ de-central architecture rather than a centralized framework and our proposed techniques do not require any extra overhead. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques enable communications in the presence of source selective jamming attacks. When the presence of a source selective jammer blocks transmissions completely, implementing a proposed flipped address mechanism increases the expected number of required transmission attempts only by one in such scenario. The probability that our second approach, random address assignment, fails to solve the correct source MAC address can be as small as 10-7 when using accurate parameter selection.