Securing microservices and microservice architectures: A systematic mapping study

Microservice architectures (MSA) are becoming trending alternatives to existing software development paradigms notably for developing complex and distributed applications. Microservices emerged as an architectural design pattern aiming address the scalability ease maintenance of online services. However, security breaches have increased threatening availability, integrity confidentiality microservice-based systems. A growing body literature is found addressing threats mechanisms individual microservices microservice architectures. The aim this study provide a helpful guide developers about already recognized on how they can be detected, mitigated or prevented; we also identify potential research gaps securing MSA. In paper, conduct systematic mapping in order categorize MSA with their proposals. Therefore, extracted details proposed solutions reported selected studies. Obtained results used lightweight ontology patterns queried source threats, prevent each threat, applicability layer validation techniques mechanism. search yielded 1067 studies which 46 primary revealed unbalanced focus favor external attacks; auditing enforcing access control most investigated compared prevention mitigation. Additionally, that soft-infrastructure applicable other layers such communication deployment. We performance analysis case