Amazon’s serverless computing service, AWS Lambda, is considered the leader of today’s serverless computing. Enterprises all over the world are leveraging serverless computing to quickly build applications and APIs without the hassle of managing the infrastructure. However, as all of your resources are on the cloud, it makes it more susceptible to vulnerability. Although serverless computing is fairly simple, it is good to practice a few best practices in order to get the most out of the benefits of serverless security.
Best practices of Serverless Security
Keep your lambdas separate
Data leaks are the most common type of threat encountered while working with serverless computing. In order to avoid such circumstances, it is recommended that all your user data, events, and other data, along with their security implications, be stored in the execution environment. Also, creating separate functions with different versions for different users is advisable for functions that rely on mutable states.
Secure API gateway
While using serverless computing, you are bound to use many APIs in your daily life. A lambda function is exposed to the outside world when an API is invoked via an HTTP request. Attackers can exploit this crack to create malware attacks. In order to safeguard, you can add an extra layer of security via the API gateway. You can add additional security functions like throttling, authentication, and encryption to your API gateway.
Prevent Injection attacks
Injection attacks are probably one of the oldest forms of attack on any software application. The attackers inject a malicious piece of code via user inputs. The most common attack surface for injection attacks is URL parameters, body parameters in POST requests, or HTTP headers.
In a traditional infrastructure, a web application firewall or WAF can prevent most of the injection attacks. But as we are talking about the serverless situation, it is ineffective at protecting against cloud service execution. To protect this, you can limit access to lambda-connected cloud resources. By doing so, you will limit the attack surface for injection attacks.
Ensure continuous monitoring
No security in this world is picture-perfect. That’s why the best practice to secure your application is to monitor your application. Monitoring your application provides you with valuable insights about your application. Analyzing them allows you to identify potential security vulnerabilities and take swift action to neutralize the threat before the attack materializes.
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