Securing your code

Whatever we do, an application must receive data and act on it, somehow, or it will not be very useful. If a service receives data, then as soon as you expose your app to the world, it is open to numerous possible types of attack, and your code needs to be designed with this in mind.

Anything that is published to the web can be attacked, although we have the advantage that most microservices are not exposed to the public internet, which reduces the possible ways they could be exploited. The expected inputs and outputs of the system are narrower, and often better defined using specification tools, such as OpenAPI.

Attacks are not always due to hostile intent, either. If the caller has a bug or is just not calling your service correctly, the expected behavior should be to send back a 4xx response and explain to the client why the request was rejected.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) (https://www.owasp.org) is an excellent resource...