Protecting the resources of a cloud-native application is essential to meet an organization's security goals. Cloud-native applications manage thousands of user requests, and an organization must employ a proper access control mechanism. However, unfortunately, developers sometimes grumble when designing and enforcing access decisions for a gigantic scalable application. It is sometimes complicated to choose the potential access control model for the system. Cloud-native software architecture has become an integral part of the industry to manage and maintain customer needs. A microservice is a combination of small independent services that might have hundreds of parts, where the developers must protect the individual services. An efficient access control model can defend the respective services and consistency. This study intends to comprehensively analyze the current access control mechanism and techniques utilized in cloud-native architecture. For this, we present a systematic mapping study that extracts current approaches, categorizes access control patterns, and provides developers guidance to meet security principles. In addition, we have gathered 234 essential articles, of which 29 have been chosen as primary studies. Our comprehensive analysis will guide practitioners to identify proper access control mechanisms applicable to ensuring security goals in cloud-native architectures.
Keywords: access control; authentication; authorization; cloud-native; microservice; security.