threat-modeling.md

Threat Model Analysis for micro/go-micro

Threat: Service Registry Poisoning

Description: An attacker gains unauthorized access to the service registry (e.g., Consul, Etcd, Kubernetes) and registers malicious services or modifies existing service entries. They might impersonate legitimate services or redirect traffic to attacker-controlled endpoints.

Impact:

• Redirection of client traffic to malicious services, leading to data breaches, DoS, or malicious code execution.
• Disruption of service discovery, causing service outages and application instability.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Service Registry (Registry interface, e.g., Consul Registry, Etcd Registry, Kubernetes Registry)

Risk Severity: Critical

Mitigation Strategies:

• Implement strong authentication and authorization for service registry access.
• Use network segmentation to restrict access to the service registry.
• Regularly audit service registry entries for anomalies and unauthorized changes.
• Consider mutual TLS (mTLS) for communication between services and the registry.

Threat: Service Registry Denial of Service (DoS)

Description: An attacker floods the service registry with requests, overwhelming its resources and causing it to become unavailable or unresponsive. This disrupts service discovery for all microservices.

Impact:

• Failure of service discovery, leading to cascading failures across the microservice ecosystem.
• Application downtime and unavailability.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Service Registry (Registry interface, e.g., Consul Registry, Etcd Registry, Kubernetes Registry)

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Implement rate limiting and traffic shaping for access to the service registry.
• Ensure the service registry infrastructure is robust and scalable.
• Monitor service registry performance and availability.
• Implement redundancy and failover mechanisms for the service registry.

Threat: Message Broker Queue Poisoning

Description: An attacker injects malicious or malformed messages into message queues used for asynchronous communication between go-micro services. These messages are then processed by consuming services.

Impact:

• Data corruption in consuming services.
• Service crashes or malfunctions due to processing unexpected messages.
• Potential for code execution in vulnerable consuming services if messages are crafted to exploit vulnerabilities.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Broker (Broker interface, e.g., NATS Broker, RabbitMQ Broker), Message Handlers in Services

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Implement robust message validation and sanitization in consuming services.
• Use message signing or encryption to ensure message integrity and authenticity.
• Apply input validation and output encoding within message handlers.
• Consider using message schemas and enforcing them during message processing.

Threat: Message Broker Queue Tampering

Description: An attacker intercepts messages in transit within the message broker and modifies their content before they reach the intended consumer service.

Impact:

• Data manipulation and corruption in consuming services.
• Bypassing of intended business logic or security checks due to altered messages.
• Potential for unauthorized actions or data modification based on manipulated messages.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Broker (Broker interface, e.g., NATS Broker, RabbitMQ Broker), Transport Layer

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Use encryption for message transport (e.g., TLS/SSL for broker connections).
• Implement message signing to detect tampering at the consumer side.
• Consider end-to-end encryption of message payloads for sensitive data.

Threat: Message Broker Queue Eavesdropping

Description: An attacker gains unauthorized access to message queues and eavesdrops on messages being exchanged between services. This allows them to intercept and read sensitive data.

Impact:

• Exposure of confidential information transmitted via messages, leading to data breaches and privacy violations.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Broker (Broker interface, e.g., NATS Broker, RabbitMQ Broker), Transport Layer

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Encrypt message transport (TLS/SSL).
• Encrypt message payloads to protect data at rest and in transit within the broker.
• Implement strict access control to message queues, limiting access to authorized services only.

Threat: Insecure Transport Configuration

Description: Go-micro services are configured to communicate using insecure transport protocols like plain HTTP instead of HTTPS or gRPC without TLS. This allows attackers to intercept and potentially modify communication.

Impact:

• Eavesdropping on inter-service communication, exposing sensitive data.
• Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, allowing attackers to intercept and modify communication.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Transport (Transport interface, e.g., gRPC Transport, HTTP Transport), Client/Server initialization

Risk Severity: Critical

Mitigation Strategies:

• Always enforce TLS/SSL for all inter-service communication.
• Configure go-micro to use secure transports (e.g., grpc with TLS, http with HTTPS).
• Properly configure TLS certificates and key management.

Threat: Codec Vulnerabilities

Description: Vulnerabilities exist in the codec libraries used for serialization/deserialization (e.g., Protobuf, JSON). Attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities by sending maliciously crafted payloads.

Impact:

• Denial of Service: Malicious payloads can crash services during deserialization.
• Potential for Code Execution: In severe cases, codec vulnerabilities could lead to remote code execution.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Codec (Codec interface, e.g., Protobuf Codec, JSON Codec), Serialization/Deserialization process

Risk Severity: High

Mitigation Strategies:

• Keep codec libraries up-to-date with the latest security patches.
• Use well-vetted and actively maintained codec libraries.
• Implement input validation even after deserialization to handle potentially malformed data.

Threat: Insecure Service-to-Service Authentication/Authorization

Description: Lack of proper authentication and authorization mechanisms between microservices. Services might trust each other implicitly without verifying identities or permissions, allowing compromised services to move laterally.

Impact:

• Lateral movement of attackers within the microservice ecosystem.
• Unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources by compromised services.
• Increased impact of a single service compromise on the entire application.

Go-Micro Component Affected: Interceptors/Middleware, Client/Server request handling

Risk Severity: Critical

Mitigation Strategies:

• Implement mutual TLS (mTLS) for service-to-service authentication.
• Use API keys, JWTs, or other token-based authentication mechanisms for service authorization.
• Enforce the principle of least privilege for service permissions.
• Utilize go-micro's middleware/interceptor capabilities to implement authentication and authorization checks consistently.