Hook-in Privacy Techniques for gRPC-based Microservice Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Loechel, Louis, Akbayin, Siar-Remzi, Grünewald, Elias, Kiesel, Jannis, Strelnikova, Inga, Janke, Thomas, Pallas, Frank
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Loechel, Louis
Akbayin, Siar-Remzi
Grünewald, Elias
Kiesel, Jannis
Strelnikova, Inga
Janke, Thomas
Pallas, Frank
author_facet Loechel, Louis
Akbayin, Siar-Remzi
Grünewald, Elias
Kiesel, Jannis
Strelnikova, Inga
Janke, Thomas
Pallas, Frank
contents gRPC is at the heart of modern distributed system architectures. Based on HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers, it provides highly performant, standardized, and polyglot communication across loosely coupled microservices and is increasingly preferred over REST- or GraphQL-based service APIs in practice. Despite its widespread adoption, gRPC lacks any advanced privacy techniques beyond transport encryption and basic token-based authentication. Such advanced techniques are, however, increasingly important for fulfilling regulatory requirements. For instance, anonymizing or otherwise minimizing (personal) data before responding to requests, or pre-processing data based on the purpose of the access may be crucial in certain usecases. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel approach for integrating such advanced privacy techniques into the gRPC framework in a practically viable way. Specifically, we present a general approach along with a working prototype that implements privacy techniques, such as data minimization and purpose limitation, in a configurable, extensible, and gRPC-native way utilizing a gRPC interceptor. We also showcase how to integrate this contribution into a realistic example of a food delivery use case. Alongside these implementations, a preliminary performance evaluation shows practical applicability with reasonable overheads. Altogether, we present a viable solution for integrating advanced privacy techniques into real-world gRPC-based microservice architectures, thereby facilitating regulatory compliance ``by design''.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_05598
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hook-in Privacy Techniques for gRPC-based Microservice Communication
Loechel, Louis
Akbayin, Siar-Remzi
Grünewald, Elias
Kiesel, Jannis
Strelnikova, Inga
Janke, Thomas
Pallas, Frank
Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Software Engineering
gRPC is at the heart of modern distributed system architectures. Based on HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers, it provides highly performant, standardized, and polyglot communication across loosely coupled microservices and is increasingly preferred over REST- or GraphQL-based service APIs in practice. Despite its widespread adoption, gRPC lacks any advanced privacy techniques beyond transport encryption and basic token-based authentication. Such advanced techniques are, however, increasingly important for fulfilling regulatory requirements. For instance, anonymizing or otherwise minimizing (personal) data before responding to requests, or pre-processing data based on the purpose of the access may be crucial in certain usecases. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel approach for integrating such advanced privacy techniques into the gRPC framework in a practically viable way. Specifically, we present a general approach along with a working prototype that implements privacy techniques, such as data minimization and purpose limitation, in a configurable, extensible, and gRPC-native way utilizing a gRPC interceptor. We also showcase how to integrate this contribution into a realistic example of a food delivery use case. Alongside these implementations, a preliminary performance evaluation shows practical applicability with reasonable overheads. Altogether, we present a viable solution for integrating advanced privacy techniques into real-world gRPC-based microservice architectures, thereby facilitating regulatory compliance ``by design''.
title Hook-in Privacy Techniques for gRPC-based Microservice Communication
topic Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05598