The microservice architecture presents many challenges from a security perspective, due to the large amount of services, leading to an increased attack surface and an unmanageable cognitive load for security analysts. Several benchmarks exist to guide the secure configuration of the deployment infrastructure for microservice applications, including containers (e.g., Docker), orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes), cloud platforms (e.g., AWS), and even operating systems (e.g., Linux). In this paper, we approach the creation of a benchmark for the design of the microservice applications themselves. To this aim, we inventorize a number of relevant security rules for the architectural design of microservice applications and assess (in a preliminary way) how these rules could be checked automatically.

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