Beyond Security: Understanding the Multiple Impacts of Security Smells for Microservices

Abstract

Microservices gained momentum in enterprise IT, as they enable building cloud-native applications. At the same time, they come with new security challenges, including security smells, viz., symptoms of bad (though often unintentional) design decisions that might affect application security. This study aims to explore the impacts of microservice security smells –and of the refactorings known to mitigate their effects– beyond security. In particular, we systematically elicit possible impacts of smells and refactorings on applications’ maintainability, performance efficiency, and adherence to microservices’ key design principles. We then validate the elicited impacts through an online survey targeting experienced practitioners and researchers. Our main contributions include 35 validated impacts and a discussion of the survey results geared towards analyzing the (mis)alignment between practitioners and researchers. Finally, we also provide a holistic view of these impacts, through Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIGs).