Microservice Security Agent Based On API Gateway in Edge Computing

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are embedded with software, electronics, and sensors, and feature connectivity with constrained resources. They require the edge computing paradigm, with modular characteristics relying on microservices, to provide an extensible and lightweight computing framework at the edge of the network. Edge computing can relieve the burden of centralized cloud computing by performing certain operations, such as data storage and task computation, at the edge of the network. Despite the benefits of edge computing, it can lead to many challenges in terms of security and privacy issues. Thus, services that protect privacy and secure data are essential functions in edge computing. For example, the end user’s ownership and privacy information and control are separated, which can easily lead to data leakage, unauthorized data manipulation, and other data security concerns. Thus, the confidentiality and integrity of the data cannot be guaranteed and, so, more secure authentication and access mechanisms are required to ensure that the microservices are exposed only to authorized users. In this paper, we propose a microservice security agent to integrate the edge computing platform with the API gateway technology for presenting a secure authentication mechanism. The aim of this platform is to afford edge computing clients a practical application which provides user authentication and allows JSON Web Token (JWT)-based secure access to the services of edge computing. To integrate the edge computing platform with the API gateway, we implement a microservice security agent based on the open-source Kong in the EdgeX Foundry framework. Also to provide an easy-to-use approach with Kong, we implement REST APIs for generating new consumers, registering services, configuring access controls. Finally, the usability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by evaluating the round trip time (RTT). The results demonstrate the efficiency of the system and its suitability for real-world applications.