Secure Serverless Computing Using Dynamic Information Flow Control
This addresses security vulnerabilities in serverless systems for cloud computing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing IFC methods.
The paper tackled the security problem of termination channels in serverless computing by proposing a dynamic information flow control approach, achieving low overhead in enforcing security properties across platforms like AWS Lambda and OpenWhisk.
The rise of serverless computing provides an opportunity to rethink cloud security. We present an approach for securing serverless systems using a novel form of dynamic information flow control (IFC). We show that in serverless applications, the termination channel found in most existing IFC systems can be arbitrarily amplified via multiple concurrent requests, necessitating a stronger termination-sensitive non-interference guarantee, which we achieve using a combination of static labeling of serverless processes and dynamic faceted labeling of persistent data. We describe our implementation of this approach on top of JavaScript for AWS Lambda and OpenWhisk serverless platforms, and present three realistic case studies showing that it can enforce important IFC security properties with low overhead.