A survey on security issues in services communication of Microservices-enabled fog applications

Fog computing is used as a popular extension of cloud computing for a variety of emerging applications. To incorporate various design choices and customized policies in fog computing paradigm, Microservices is proposed as a new software architecture, which is easy to modify and quick to deploy fog applications because of its significant features, ie, fine granularity and loose coupling. Unfortunately, the Microservices architecture is vulnerable due to its wildly distributed interfaces that are easily attacked. However, the industry has not been fully aware of its security issues. In this paper, a survey of different security risks that pose a threat to the Microservices-based fog applications is presented. Because a fog application based on Microservices architecture consists of numerous services and communication among services is frequent, we focus on the security issues that arise in services communication of Microservices in four aspects: containers, data, permission, and network. Containers are often used as the deployment and operational environment for Microservices. Data is communicated among services and is vital for every enterprise. Permission is the guarantee of services security. Network security is the foundation for secure communication. Finally, we propose an ideal solution for security issues in services communication of Microservices-based fog applications.