Serverless Application Security

Serverless is relatively new paradigm that simplifies distributed application development by allowing application developers to focus on their business logic and reduce infrastructure configuration and maintenance efforts. Serverless deployments can sometimes produce very complex systems of interconnected functions and associated services. This can result in new issues that may affect the performance and security of the deployment such as: state explosion, information leakage or overprivileged applications.

This project will focus on developing techniques to help developers understand and automatically identify security vulnerabilities within serverless applications. The project will be carried out within the Information Security Group and Computer Science Departments at Royal Holloway. Researchers from these departments have extensive experience in distributed system security and information-flow analysis via static and dynamic analysis techniques.

Students pursuing this project are expected to develop new static and dynamic analysis techniques to analyse serverless deployments. We are seeking applicants with a background in Computer Science or a related discipline. Prospective applications are welcome to discuss this project with Dr Jorge Blasco Alis (Jorge.BlascoAlis@rhul.ac.uk) and Dr Daniel O’Keeffe (Daniel.OKeeffe@rhul.ac.uk)