Secure microservices communication between heterogeneous service meshes

Sammanfattning

Microservice architecture is an emerging paradigm that has been unceasingly adopted by large organizations to develop flexible, agile, and distributed applications. This architecture involves breaking a large monolithic application into multiple services that can be deployed and scaled autonomously. Moreover, it helps to improve the resiliency and fault tolerance of a large-scale distributed application. However, this architecture is not without challenges. It increases the number of services communicating with each other, leading to an increased surface of attack. To overcome the security vulnerabilities, it is important that the communication between the services must be secured. Service Mesh is increasingly embraced to resolve the security challenges of microservices and facilitate secure and reliable communication. It is a dedicated infrastructure layer on top of microservices responsible for their networking logic. It uses sidecar proxies to ensure secure and encrypted communication between the services. This thesis studies different deployment models of service meshes, identifies the reasons for federating heterogeneous service meshes, investigates the existing problems faced during the federation process, and proposes a solution to achieve a secure federation between heterogeneous service meshes, i.e., Istio and Consul. The security of the proposed solution was evaluated against the basic security requirements, such as Authenticity, Confidentiality, and Integrity. The evaluation results proved the solution to be secure and feasible for implementation.