Starting the Avalanche: Application DoS In Microservice Architectures

About This Modern Security Series Episode

We'd like to introduce you to one of the most devastating ways to cause service instability in modern micro-service architectures: application DDoS. Unlike traditional network DDoS that focuses on network pipes and edge resources, our talk focuses on identifying and targeting expensive calls within a micro-services architecture, using their complex interconnected relationships to cause the system to attack itself — with massive effect. In modern microservice architectures it's easier to cause service instability with sophisticated requests that model legitimate traffic to pass right through web application firewalls. 

This talk shares knowledge around how to improve modern microservice architectures. Specifically, it covers:

• How the Netflix application security team identified area of our microservices that ultimately laid the groundwork for exponential-work attacks
• A real Netflix case study of how a single request into an API endpoint fans out through the application fabric and results in an exponential set of dependent service calls
• The frameworks Netflix collaborated on building that refine the automation and reproducibility of testing the endpoints, leveraged against our live production environment

Attendees will leave this talk understanding architectural and technical approaches to identify and remediate application DDoS vulnerabilities within their own applications. Attendees will also gain a greater understanding on how take a novel new attack methodology and build an orchestration framework that can be used at a global scale.