Component-Based Refinement and Verification of Information-Flow Security Policies for Cyber-Physical Microservice Architectures

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are closely interconnected with the outside world, exchanging information with different parties. From a security viewpoint, it is therefore crucial for software engineers to ensure that confidential information is never leaked to unauthorized third parties. To protect CPS against such security leaks, the flow of information must be regulated and analyzed in the early design phase. Formal methods for regulation and analysis are provided by the theory of information-flow security. Due to the popularity of component-based design principles (e.g., such as the microservice architectural style), the software of CPS is increasingly composed of multiple components. Thus, each component must be provided with an individual security policy that regulates the flow of information between the component's interfaces. To satisfy the security regulations of the composite system, these policies must be composable in a way that prevents unauthorized information flows from end to end.

Towards a Security Stress-Test for Cloud Configurations

“…Access control and network security policies for cloud deployment are well studied by providing either access control solutions [6], [7], [8], [9] or by supporting the automated policy generation from given specifications [10], [6], [11]. Recent works also provide mechanisms for formal verification of microservice deployments [12], or continuous assessment methodologies [13]. Yet, the automatic or even computeraided exploration and validation of configuration policies as available in practical deployments (e.g.…”

Confidentiality and Integrity Mechanisms for Microservices Communication

“…The findings include cryptographic protocols such as Diffie-Hellman and TLS; protocols for secure communication, such as gRPC and WS-Security; communication and message protocols such as RESTful, RabbitMQ, AMQP, ZeroMQ, Google Protobuf serializer, OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), Extendable Machine Connector (XSC), Pasty Protocol; and, Pastry or Scribe, as protocols for the discovery of services. In addition, we found six articles that discuss protocols and API construction patterns for the communication of systems, entities, and processes in a microservices architecture: [27], [31], [32], [33], [34] and [35].…”

Towards model-based development of decentralised peer-to-peer data vaults

“…Then, it is possible to send requests to a concrete data vault by using their identifier when sending the request. There are several message broker applications available, such as Apache ActiveMQ 3 (the one currently in use by Vaultage), Kafka 4 , or Mosquitto [8].…”

“…Related to communication aspects, there are several model-driven approaches that aim to ease the definition of network configurations. These approaches focus mostly on information flow and access control [1,4,13], which are general concerns of any kind of network infrastructure. However, less efforts have been put into the automatic generation of secure network communication capabilities provided by Vaultage.…”