Microservices in IoT Security: Current Solutions, Research Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This paper surveys how microservices architecture is used to enhance security in IoT applications, highlighting current solutions, challenges, and future research directions.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive survey exploring microservices-based security approaches specifically for IoT environments.

Findings

Microservices offer extensible and reconfigurable security features for IoT.

Current research addresses vulnerabilities through microservices architectures.

The survey identifies key challenges and future opportunities in IoT security using microservices.

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to the emergence of multiple smart applications in different vital sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, energy management, etc. IoT aims to interconnect several intelligent devices over the Internet such as sensors, monitoring systems, and smart appliances to control, store, exchange, and analyze collected data. The main issue in IoT environments is that they can present potential vulnerabilities to be illegally accessed by malicious users, which threatens the safety and privacy of gathered data. To face this problem, several recent works have been conducted using microservices-based architecture to minimize the security threats and attacks related to IoT data. By employing microservices, these works offer extensible, reusable, and reconfigurable security features. In this paper, we aim to provide a survey about microservices-based approaches for securing IoT applications. This survey will help practitioners understand ongoing challenges and explore new and promising research opportunities in the IoT security field. To the best of our knowledge, this paper constitutes the first survey that investigates the use of microservices technology for securing IoT applications.