Deepak Sirone Jegan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Liang Wang, Princeton University; Siddhant Bhagat, Microsoft; Michael Swift, University of Wisconsin-Madison
As an emerging application paradigm, serverless computing attracts attention from more and more adversaries. Unfortunately, security tools for conventional web applications cannot be easily ported to serverless computing due to its distributed nature, and existing serverless security solutions focus on enforcing user specified information flow policies which are unable to detect the manipulation of the order of functions in application control flow paths. In this paper, we present Kalium, an extensible security framework that leverages local function state and global application state to enforce control-flow integrity (CFI) in serverless applications. We evaluate the performance overhead and security of Kalium using realistic open-source applications; our results show that Kalium mitigates several classes of attacks with relatively low performance overhead and outperforms the state-of-the-art serverless information flow protection systems.
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author = {Deepak Sirone Jegan and Liang Wang and Siddhant Bhagat and Michael Swift},
title = {Guarding Serverless Applications with Kalium},
booktitle = {32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-37-3},
address = {Anaheim, CA},
pages = {4087--4104},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/jegan},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}