What are the best ways to secure a serverless environment with encryption?

2 Encryption in transit

Encryption in transit refers to encrypting data that is transferred over a network, such as between the serverless function and the storage service, or between the serverless function and the client. Encryption in transit is important for preventing data interception, manipulation, or impersonation, as it ensures that only the intended recipient can decrypt and verify the data. Serverless applications often use HTTPS, TLS, or SSL protocols to encrypt data in transit, and to establish secure connections between the serverless function and the storage service, or between the serverless function and the client. Therefore, it is important to use valid and trusted certificates, and to enforce strict policies for validating and verifying the certificates. Moreover, it is recommended to use a secure API gateway, such as AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, or Google Cloud Endpoints, to manage and monitor the encryption in transit for the serverless functions, and to provide additional security features, such as authentication, authorization, throttling, and logging.

3 Encryption in use

Encryption in use refers to encrypting data that is processed or manipulated by the serverless function, such as performing calculations, transformations, or validations on the data. Encryption in use is important for preventing data exposure, corruption, or tampering, as it ensures that the data is only accessible and modifiable by the authorized serverless function. Serverless applications often use encryption libraries or frameworks, such as AWS Encryption SDK, Azure Encryption Extensions, or Google Cloud Tink, to encrypt and decrypt data in use within the serverless function. Therefore, it is important to use the latest and most secure versions of these libraries or frameworks, and to follow the best practices for implementing encryption in use, such as using random initialization vectors, padding, or nonce values, and avoiding reusing or sharing encryption keys or secrets.

4 Encryption challenges

Encryption is not a silver bullet for securing serverless applications, and it also comes with some challenges and trade-offs. Performance, complexity, and compliance are three common encryption challenges for serverless applications. Performance-wise, encryption and decryption operations can add latency and overhead to the serverless function execution, as well as consume more memory and CPU resources. This can affect the responsiveness and scalability of the serverless application, as well as increase the cost of the serverless function invocation. To address this, it is important to balance the level and type of encryption with performance and budget requirements, and optimize the encryption and decryption processes using techniques like caching, compression, or parallelization. Complexity-wise, encryption and decryption operations can add difficulty to the serverless function development, testing, and debugging. To address this, it is important to simplify these processes by using encryption libraries or frameworks, encryption as a service, or encryption by default options. Compliance-wise, encryption and decryption operations can add compliance obligations to the serverless application. To address this, it is important to comply with relevant standards like PCI DSS or GDPR, as well as audit and document the encryption and decryption processes using logs, reports, or certificates.