Assessing Architecture Conformance to Security-Related Practices in Infrastructure as Code Based Deployments

Assessing Architecture Conformance to Security-Related Practices in Infrastructure as Code Based Deployments

Abstract

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables developers and operations teams to automatically deploy and manage an IT infrastructure via software. Among other uses, IaC is widely used in the context of continuously released deployments such as those of microservice and other cloud-based systems. Although IaC-based deployments have been utilized by many companies, there are no approaches on checking their conformance to architectural aspects yet. In this paper, we focus on security-related practices including observability, access control, and traffic control in IaC-based deployments. While best practices for this topic have been documented in some gray literature sources such as practitioners' blogs and public repositories, approaches enabling automated checking of conformance to such best practices do not yet exist. We propose a model-based approach based on generic, technology-independent metrics, tied to typical architectural design decisions on IaC-based deployments. With this approach, we can measure conformance to security-related practices. We demonstrate and assess the validity and appropriateness of these metrics in assessing a system's conformance to practices through regression analysis.

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Authors
  • Ntentos, Evangelos
  • Zdun, Uwe
  • Falazi, Ghareeb
  • Breitenbücher, Uwe
  • Leymann, Frank
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Projects
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2022)
Divisions
Software Architecture
Subjects
Software Engineering
Event Location
Barcelona, Spain
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
11-16 July 2022
Series Name
2022 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (IEEE SCC 2022)
ISSN/ISBN
978-1-6654-8146-5
Page Range
pp. 123-133
Date
July 2022
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