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WeAreDevelopers LIVE • Feb 24, 2022

Security Challenges of Breaking A Monolith

Reinhard Kugler

Decomposing your monolith expands your external attack surface, yet strictly limits a vulnerability's blast radius. Discover how to map trust boundaries and confidently secure modern distributed architectures.

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#1 about 8 min

Building a monolithic video streaming and sharing application

How hardware scaling limitations drive the shift from a monolithic application to distributed services.

#2 about 2 min

Breaking the monolith into isolated microservices and components

Extracting specific functions into microservices solves resource idling and performance bottlenecks.

#3 about 2 min

Addressing base image vulnerabilities in application containers

Containerizing microservices introduces supply chain risks through vulnerable dependencies in base images.

#4 about 3 min

Mapping trust boundaries across frontend and backend services

Separating frontend systems from backend message brokers reduces the attack surface for bad actors.

#5 about 7 min

Managing authentication and authorization for cloud storage buckets

Configuring explicit bucket policies ensures only authorized identities can interact with sensitive cloud storage.

#6 about 3 min

Generating temporary access tokens with pre-signed URLs

Pre-signed URLs enable temporary anonymous access but introduce risks if private signing keys leak.

#7 about 2 min

Distributing and securing keys across cloud container workloads

Distributing long-lived access keys across Kubernetes containers increases the risk of endpoint compromise.

#8 about 3 min

Validating untrusted storage uploads with serverless cloud functions

Invoking a serverless function upon file upload provides scalable input validation for untrusted assets.

#9 about 2 min

Exploiting media transcoders via processing vulnerabilities in containers

Parsing untrusted media uploads in a transcoding container risks arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

#10 about 3 min

Escalating privileges from local container exploits to infrastructure

Compromising a single container provides access to environmental secrets and internal infrastructure.

#11 about 1 min

Mitigating container escalation paths using system call filters

Applying seccomp profiles improves container integrity by restricting unauthorized system interactions.

#12 about 3 min

Evaluating the security posture of microservices versus monolithic systems

Microservices effectively contain security breaches by complicating privilege escalation across isolated network boundaries.

#13 about 12 min

Addressing audience questions on security and microservice architectures

Technical discussion covers artificial intelligence in log analysis and the organizational tradeoffs of architectural decisions.

Matching moments

3:18 min

Transitioning from a monolith to a microservice architecture

Aleksandr Kalikov · LIVE

2:14 min

Evaluating data storage limitations and monolithic architectural challenges

George Asafev · WWC 2023

3:32 min

Transitioning from monolith architectures to microservices and Kubernetes

Liviu Costea · LIVE

3:07 min

Transitioning architecture to microservices at Netflix

Steve Upton Steve Upton · WWC 2022

3:38 min

Shifting from monolithic architectures to microservices and containers

Markus Kett Markus Kett · WWC 2022

1:39 min

Introduction to Kubernetes security challenges and opportunities

Marc Nimmerrichter · WWC 2022

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