Event-driven security

Event-driven architectures have emerged as the bedrock of contemporary cloud-native applications, especially those leveraging serverless platforms. While these architectures offer many benefits, such as scalability and decoupling, they also present unique security challenges. This section aims to offer an in-depth exploration of these challenges, focusing on strategies for mitigation, with a specific emphasis on EventBridge.

Event sources

First and foremost, it is essential to identify and secure the event sources. These could range from API requests and message queues to cloud storage and databases. Ensuring that only authorized entities can generate events is the first line of defense in event-driven security. This often involves implementing proper authentication and authorization mechanisms, both at the event source and destination levels.

Event schema validation

EventBridge’s schema registry allows event schemas to be defined, which serve as a blueprint for incoming events. This ensures that events conform to expected formats, thereby adding an extra layer of security. The schema registry can validate the structure of incoming events, ensuring they meet predefined criteria before they are processed, thereby reducing the risk of malformed or malicious data entering the system. For instance, you could set up a schema that requires all incoming events to have certain fields, and any event not meeting these criteria could be dropped and flagged for further investigation.

Event data encryption

EventBridge offers multiple avenues for encrypting event data. You can employ an AWS KMS customer master key (CMK) to encrypt both the event payloads and metadata that are stored by EventBridge. Simultaneously, you can also take advantage of AWS services that inherently support encryption, such as Amazon SNS topics or Amazon SQS queues, when configuring them as targets. In addition to this, data in transit is natively encrypted through AWS API communication, which relies on TLS protocols between the EventBridge bus, event sources, and destinations. This adds an extra layer of security to the data as it moves between components. These combined encryption measures not only protect sensitive data but also help in meeting compliance requirements.