The Exploit Model of Serverless Cloud Applications
Serverless platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings are being deployed at an increasing rate for many reasons. They relate to information in a myriad of ways, unlocking new opportunities to collect data, identify data, and ultimately find ways to transform data to value.
Figure 1. Serverless application models.
Serverless applications can cost-effectively reply and process information at scale, returning critical data models and transformations synchronously to browsers or mobile devices. Synchronous serverless applications unlock mobile device interactions and near-real-time processing for on-the-go insights.
Asynchronous serverless applications can create data sets and views on large batches of data over time. We previously needed to have every piece of data and run batch reports, but we now have the ability to stagger events, or even make requests, wait some time to check in on them, and get results that bring value to the organization a few minutes or an hour later.
Areas as diverse as tractors, manufacturing, and navigation are benefiting from the ability to stream individual data points and look for larger relationships. These streams build value out of small bits of data. Individually they’re innocuous and of minimal value, but together they provide new intelligence we struggled to capture before.
The key theme throughout these models is the value of the underlying data. Protecting this data, while still using it to create value becomes a critical objective for the cloud-transforming enterprise. We can start by looking at the model for how data moves into and out of the application. A basic access and data model illustrates the way the application, access medium, CSP provider security, and serverless PaaS application have to work together to balance protection and capability.
Figure 2. Basic access and data model for serverless applications.
A deeper exploration of the security environment—and the shared responsibility in cloud security—forces us to look more carefully at who is involved, and how each party in the cloud ecosystem is empowered to see potential threats to the environment, and to the transaction specifically. When we expand the access and data model to look at the activities in a modern synchronous serverless application, we can see how the potential threats expand rapidly.
Figure 3. Expanded access and data model for a synchronous serverless application.
Organizations using this common model for an integrated serverless PaaS application are also gaining information from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) elements in the environment. This leads to a more specific view of the threats that exist:
Figure 4. Sample threats in a serverless application.
By pushing the information security team to more carefully and specifically consider the ways the application can be exploited, they can then take simple actions to ensure that both development activities and the architecture for the application itself offer protection. A few examples:
- Threat: Network sniffing/MITM
- Protection: High integrity TLS, with signed API requests and responses
- Threat: Code exploit
- Protection: Code review, and SAST/pen testing on regular schedule
- Threat: Data structure exploit
- Protection: API forced data segmentation and request limiting, managed data model
The organization first must recognize the potential risk, make it part of the culture to ask the question, “What threats to my data does my change or new widget introduce?” and make it an expectation of deployment that privacy and security demand a response.
Otherwise, your intellectual property may just become the foundation of someone else’s profit.
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