Serverless Security
Compute is short-lived, but identities, permissions, triggers, secrets, and tenant boundaries still determine what the system is allowed to do and how far one mistake can spread.
This chapter covers how trust is established and constrained in serverless systems. Compute is short-lived, but identities, permissions, triggers, secrets, and tenant boundaries still determine what the system is allowed to do and how far one mistake can spread.
Read the lessons in order. They move from execution identity and least privilege into secret handling, input and event trust, and finally tenant isolation. The recurring theme is that managed services reduce infrastructure toil, but they do not remove the need to model trust boundaries explicitly.
In this section
- Function Identity and Least Privilege
Describe execution roles, service identities, resource-scoped permissions, and why overbroad permissions are one of the most dangerous serverless anti-patterns.
- Secrets, Keys, and Sensitive Configuration
Explain safe handling of secrets, certificates, API keys, and runtime configuration. Show how serverless changes the mechanics of secret delivery but not the responsibility.
- Input Validation, API Security, and Event Trust
Describe how serverless systems validate requests, sanitize payloads, authenticate callers, and verify event origin. Explain why event-driven systems still need trust boundaries.
- Multi-Tenancy and Isolation
Cover tenant-aware design, per-tenant authorization, tenant-scoped resources, and the special challenges of isolating data and execution in shared serverless platforms.