Confidentiality and Integrity Mechanisms for Microservices Communication

The microservices architecture tries to deal with the challenges posed by distributed systems, such as scalability, availability, and system deployment; by means of highly cohesive, heterogeneous, and independent microservices. However, this architecture also brings new security challenges related to communication, system design, development, and operation. The literature contains spread information regarding security related solutions for microservices-based systems, but this spread makes difficult for practitioners to adopt novel security related solutions. In this study, we aim to present a catalogue of security solutions based on algorithms, protocols, standards, or implementations; supporting principles or characteristics of information security, also considering the three possible states of data, according to the McCumber Cube. Our research follows a Systematic Literature Review, synthesizing the results with a meta-aggregation process. We identified a total of 30 primary studies, yielding 71 security solutions for the communication of microservices.