Serverless Security
Serverless security covers the practices and controls required to protect serverless functions and applications from threats such as event injection, overprivileged roles, and insecure dependencies. It shifts focus from infrastructure hardening to application-layer and configuration-level security.
Serverless computing, exemplified by platforms like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions, abstracts away server management entirely. While this eliminates many infrastructure-level security concerns, it introduces new challenges around function-level permissions, event-driven attack surfaces, and third-party dependency risks.
Each serverless function should follow the principle of least privilege, with IAM roles scoped to only the specific resources and actions the function needs. Overprivileged functions are a common misconfiguration that can allow attackers to pivot across cloud services if a single function is compromised. Event sources such as API Gateway, message queues, and storage triggers must be treated as untrusted input, requiring thorough validation and sanitization to prevent injection attacks.
Dependency management is critical because serverless functions often rely on numerous third-party packages. Vulnerable or malicious dependencies can introduce remote code execution risks. Organizations should use software composition analysis (SCA) tools to scan dependencies, pin package versions, and minimize the number of external libraries. Monitoring and observability are also essential, as traditional security tools cannot inspect serverless execution environments. Cloud-native logging services and specialized serverless security platforms provide the visibility needed to detect anomalous function behavior and respond to incidents.