Security is a significant priority for cloud-native systems, regardless of the system size and complexity. Therefore, one must utilize a set of defensive mechanisms or controls to protect the system from exploitation by potential adversaries. There is an expanding amount of research on security issues, including attacks against individual microservices or overall systems and their corresponding defense mechanism options. This study intends to provide a comprehensive overview of currently used defense mechanisms involving static analysis that can detect and react against associated attacks and vulnerabilities. We present a systematic literature review that extracts current approaches for the security analysis of microservices and the violation of security principles. We gathered 1049 relevant publications, of which 50 were selected as primary studies. We are providing practitioners and developers with a structured survey of the existing literature of defensive solutions for microservice architectures and cloud-native systems to aid them in identifying applicable solutions for their systems.
Keywords: attacks; cloud-native; defense; microservice; security; static analysis; vulnerabilities.