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Research Paper | Computer Science and Information Technology | United States of America | Volume 13 Issue 4, April 2024 | Rating: 5 / 10

Secure and Scalable Service-to-Service Interaction in Serverless Microservices Environments

Roshan Mahant | Sumit Bhatnagar | Vikas Mendhe ^[2]

Abstract: Serverless computing environments consist of standalone microservices that operate independently and scale up autonomously. To enable decentralized communication among these services, peer-to-peer protocols can be employed. This paper introduces Themis, a framework designed for secure service-to-service interaction within serverless environments and underlying service mesh architectures. Themis leverages decentralized identity management to facilitate confidential and authenticated communication between services without relying on a centralized certificate authority. The framework adopts a layered architecture, with a lower layer comprising a core communication protocol pair that offers strong security guarantees without relying on a centralized authority. Building upon this foundation, an upper layer provides actions related to communication and identifier management, such as store, find, and join operations. The paper examines the security properties of Themis's protocol suite and demonstrates its decentralized and flexible communication platform. Evaluation of the Themis prototype, implemented in JavaScript for serverless applications, reveals that these security benefits are accompanied by minimal runtime latency, throughput overheads, and modest startup delays. Themis offers a promising solution for secure and scalable service-to-service interaction in serverless computing environments.

Keywords: Lambda, microservices architectures, Themis, secure communication, service mesh, decentralized identity management, serverless applications

Edition: Volume 13 Issue 4, April 2024,

Pages: 1472 - 1481