FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Barrak, Amine, Ksontini, Emna, Atike, Ridouane, Jaafar, Fehmi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Barrak, Amine
Ksontini, Emna
Atike, Ridouane
Jaafar, Fehmi
author_facet Barrak, Amine
Ksontini, Emna
Atike, Ridouane
Jaafar, Fehmi
contents Serverless computing significantly alters software development by abstracting infrastructure management and enabling rapid, modular, event-driven deployments. Despite its benefits, the distinct characteristics of serverless functions, such as ephemeral execution and fine-grained scalability, pose unique security challenges, particularly in open-source platforms like OpenFaaS. Existing approaches typically address isolated phases of the DevSecOps lifecycle, lacking an integrated and comprehensive security strategy. To bridge this gap, we propose FaaSGuard, a unified DevSecOps pipeline explicitly designed for open-source serverless environments. FaaSGuard systematically embeds lightweight, fail-closed security checks into every stage of the development lifecycle-planning, coding, building, deployment, and monitoring-effectively addressing threats such as injection attacks, hard-coded secrets, and resource exhaustion. We validate our approach empirically through a case study involving 20 real-world serverless functions from public GitHub repositories. Results indicate that FaaSGuard effectively detects and prevents critical vulnerabilities, demonstrating high precision (95%) and recall (91%) without significant disruption to established CI/CD practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04328
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study
Barrak, Amine
Ksontini, Emna
Atike, Ridouane
Jaafar, Fehmi
Software Engineering
Serverless computing significantly alters software development by abstracting infrastructure management and enabling rapid, modular, event-driven deployments. Despite its benefits, the distinct characteristics of serverless functions, such as ephemeral execution and fine-grained scalability, pose unique security challenges, particularly in open-source platforms like OpenFaaS. Existing approaches typically address isolated phases of the DevSecOps lifecycle, lacking an integrated and comprehensive security strategy. To bridge this gap, we propose FaaSGuard, a unified DevSecOps pipeline explicitly designed for open-source serverless environments. FaaSGuard systematically embeds lightweight, fail-closed security checks into every stage of the development lifecycle-planning, coding, building, deployment, and monitoring-effectively addressing threats such as injection attacks, hard-coded secrets, and resource exhaustion. We validate our approach empirically through a case study involving 20 real-world serverless functions from public GitHub repositories. Results indicate that FaaSGuard effectively detects and prevents critical vulnerabilities, demonstrating high precision (95%) and recall (91%) without significant disruption to established CI/CD practices.
title FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04328