Guy Podjarny published a great blog post discussing the Serverless space from a security perspective. I highly recommend reading it as it touches on some great points, going over both the security benefits and possible risks.
Two points he made definitely stood out to me, and the first was the concept of a greater attack surface. When I explain FaaS (Functions as a Service) to people, many immediately equate a function as being synonymous to a simple API endpoint. To a degree, they are correct. Then, what’s the difference, and why should we look at security in regard to both from different perspectives? I believe the differentiator becomes how the endpoint is exposed, and what its purpose is.
Standard API endpoints will often belong to a broader application or set of microservices that reside behind a shared layer of security. This could be dedicated network hardware, hardened reverse proxies, etc. As a security minded developer, you develop your endpoint and consider the possible client side attack vectors (Guy points to the OWASP Top Ten guide (Open Web Application Security Project) which is a great place to start; Thomas Ptacek also has a great list here); then possibly move on to write another endpoint, which will share these concerns, all the time relying on that first level layer of security.
When you start developing a suite of functions, things can start to get fragmented. Dependencies start to change between functions, software versions might differ, and the ways the functions are triggered may require different configurations on the network/gateway layer.
The second point that stood out was around monitoring: There are countless battle-tested monitoring solutions out there, but the way functions are deployed and used within an underlying architecture might leave them completely out of their scope. Guy makes a great point about how many of these products are agents that rely on long running processes to keep an eye on and collect from. In order to monitor functions, different techniques need to be implemented for short-lived and hot processes.
All of these are great problems to have and point to fast moving innovation in already fast moving industries. You’ll see most vendors and platforms already tackling these issues and building solutions into their products. This space is still young! Here at Iron, we’re committed to helping make IronFunctions become a respected open source solution for delivering FaaS to wherever you want to deploy it.
