The MDSC paradigm design for serverless computing defense

Abstract

Serverless computing aims to handle all the system administration operations needed in cloud computing, thus, to provide a paradigm that greatly simplifies cloud programming. However, the security in serverless computing is regarded as an independent technology. The lack of security consideration in the initial design makes it difficult to handle the increasingly complicated attack scenario in serverless computing, especially for the vulnerabilities and backdoor based network attack. In this paper, we propose MDSC, a mimic defense enabled paradigm for serverless computing. Specifically, MDSC paradigm introduces Dynamic Heterogeneous Redundancy (DHR) structural model to serverless computing, and make fully use of features introduced by serverless computing to achieve an intrinsic security system with acceptable costs. We show the feasibility of MDSC paradigm by implementing a trial of MDSC paradigm based on Kubernetes and Knative. Analysis and experimental results show that MDSC paradigm can achieve high level security with acceptable cost.