Automatic Policy Generation for Inter-Service Access Control of Microservices

Cloud applications today are often composed of many microservices. To prevent a microservice from being abused by other (compromised) microservices, inter-service access control is applied. However, the complexity of fine-grained access control policies, along with the large-scale and dynamic nature of microservices, makes the current manual configuration-based access control unsuitable. This paper presents AUTOARMOR, the first attempt to automate inter-service access control policy generation for microservices, with two fundamental techniques: (1) a static analysis-based request extraction mechanism that automatically obtains the invocation logic among microservices, and (2) a graph-based policy management mechanism that generates corresponding access control policies with on-demand policy update. Our evaluation on popular microservice applications shows that AUTOARMOR is able to generate fine-grained inter-service access control policies and update them timely based on changes in the application, with only a minor runtime overhead. By seamlessly integrating with the lifecycle of microservices, it does not require any changes to existing code and infrastructures.