Towards a security‐optimized approach for the microservice‐oriented decomposition

Abstract

Microservice architecture (MSA) is a mainstream architectural style due to its high maintainability and scalability. In practice, an appropriate microservice‐oriented decomposition is the foundation to make a system enjoy the benefits of MSA. In terms of decomposing monolithic systems into microservices, researchers have been exploring many optimization objectives, of which modularity is a predominantly focused quality attribute. Security is also a critical quality attribute, that measures the extent to which a system protects data from malicious access or use by attackers. Considering security in microservices‐oriented decomposition can help avoid the risk of leaking critical data and other unexpected software security issues. However, few researchers consider the security objective during microservice‐oriented decomposition, because the measurement of security and the trade‐off with other objectives are challenging in reality. To bridge this research gap, we propose a security‐optimized approach for microservice‐oriented decomposition (So4MoD). In this approach, we adapt five metrics from previous studies for the measurement of the data security of candidate microservices. A multi‐objective optimization algorithm based on NSGA‐II is designed to search for microservices with optimized security and modularity. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed So4MoD, we perform several experiments on eight open‐source projects and compare the decomposition results to other three state‐of‐the‐art approaches, that is, FoSCI, CO‐GCN, and MSExtractor. The experiment results show that our approach can achieve at least an 11.5% improvement in terms of security metrics. Moreover, the decomposition results of So4MoD outperform other approaches in four modularity metrics, demonstrating that So4MoD can optimize data security while pursuing a well‐modularized MSA.