# Security in Cloud-Native Services: A Survey
###### Abstract
Orchestration platforms abstract away the underlying infrastructure complexities, allowing developers to focus on building and deploying applications without having to worry about the infrastructure details. Cloud-native services leverage the scalability and resilience that are associated with cloud infrastructures [11]. They utilize auto-scaling capabilities to automatically adjust resources based on workload demands, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency. Load balancers distribute incoming traffic across multiple instances of services, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance [12]. Distributed data storage and caching mechanisms are employed to handle large volumes of data and provide fast and efficient access [13]. Furthermore, cloud-native services require robust monitoring and observability capabilities to ensure optimal performance and detect issues. Monitoring tools [14] collect and analyze metrics, logs, and traces from various components of the cloud-native environment, providing insights into the health, performance, and behavior of services. Observability facilitates troubleshooting, performance optimization, and proactive management of applications [15]. Such architectural paradigms are characterized by an overly distributed nature. However, this distributed nature, despite its numerous benefits, introduces unique cybersecurity challenges. These services are provided through a network of servers, creating a large attack surface for potential attackers. Due to that, they are susceptible to all sorts of threats such as malware, DDoS, or Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks [16, 17]. Furthermore, many of these services process sensitive data, including user data and proprietary information, which are often stored in the cloud and must be protected from unauthorized access [18]. On top of that, the dynamic and scalable nature of cloud-native services makes maintaining a consistent security posture challenging. The services must be able to scale quickly to meet user demand, but this requires the deployment of new instances and infrastructure, which can introduce new vulnerabilities. Due to these facts, there is an ever-increasing need to establish efficient security solutions [19, 20] that are capable of mitigating the potential security threats associated with cloud-native services, while being aligned with the aforementioned characteristics of cloud-native services. In order to do so, it is of paramount importance to identify and analyze the desired features in terms of cybersecurity that cloud-native services should have. Despite the fact that there have been numerous surveys that explore various aspects of security (such as requirements, challenges, and solutions) in the cloud [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36], there have been none that focus on security from the perspective of cloud-native services. In fact,although these two terms are closely related, there are some distinct differences. Security in cloud-native services specifically focuses on the security considerations related to applications and services that are designed and built to leverage the capabilities of cloud-native architectures. These services are characterized by their use of containerization, microservices, serverless computing, and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Furthermore, security in cloud-native services addresses the unique challenges and requirements that arise from the adoption of cloud-native architectures, such as container security [37], service mesh security [38], and the dynamic nature of deployments. It encompasses the security of individual cloud-native components, their interactions, and the overall security of the cloud-native environment.