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Securing Serverless Applications: Best Practices
Introduction
- Security and compliance are primary considerations when building applications, whether in the cloud or elsewhere.
- Serverless allows for quick delivery of customer value while building on a secure baseline.
- The session will explore best practices for securing serverless applications and finding the right balance between innovation and security.
Serverless Security Baseline
- Serverless shifts the shared responsibility model, with AWS taking on more of the undifferentiated heavy lifting in security.
- Serverless provides a secure baseline, including encryption, isolation, and access control.
- Security is a collaboration between different teams: security, platform builders, and developers.
Protecting Against Injection Attacks
- Use API Gateway to validate input data before invoking the Lambda function.
- Leverage AWS WAF to protect against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other attacks.
- Validate input in the Lambda function code using tools like the "Power Tools for AWS Lambda" open-source project.
Implementing Least Privilege
- Train developers to create fine-grained IAM policies for their resources.
- Use IAM permissions boundaries to set the maximum effective permissions for developer-created roles and policies.
- Apply Service Control Policies (SCPs) at the organizational level to restrict what resources can be created.
Securing Service-to-Service Communication
- Use IAM roles and policies to control access to the control plane (management actions) and data plane (data access) of serverless services.
- Leverage resource-based policies, such as on Lambda functions and Event Bridge, to control who can invoke them.
- Consider using API Gateway or AppSync to front your databases and leverage IAM for access control.
Managing Secrets and Credentials
- Avoid hardcoding credentials in your code, and use AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store instead.
- Utilize the Lambda extension for Secrets Manager and Parameter Store to simplify credential management.
- Store credentials in memory during the function initialization phase to improve performance and avoid overwhelming the credential provider.
Platform Security Considerations
- Use multi-account strategies and service control policies to enforce security and governance policies.
- Implement security guardrails in the software delivery pipeline to prevent misconfigurations.
- Leverage AWS services like Amazon Inspector and AWS Guard Duty for vulnerability scanning and runtime anomaly detection.
- Use AWS Security Hub to centralize security insights from various sources.
Conclusion
- Security is a collaborative effort across teams, and implementing the principles of least privilege is crucial.
- Take advantage of the deep integrations between AWS services to apply defense-in-depth security measures.
- Automate security processes wherever possible to improve efficiency and effectiveness.