A Data Protection Approach for Cloud-Native Applications: Draft NIST IR 8505 is Available for Comment

The initial public draft of NIST Internal Report (IR) 8505, A Data Protection Approach for Cloud-Native Applications, is now available for public comment.

Cloud-native applications, which are generally based on microservices-based application architecture, involve the governance of thousands of services with as many inter-service calls. In this environment, ensuring data security involves more than simply specifying and granting authorization during service requests. It also requires a comprehensive strategy to categorize and analyze data access and leakage as data travels across various protocols (e.g., gRPC, REST-based), especially within ephemeral and scalable microservices implemented as containers.

Hence, in addition to techniques for protecting data at rest (e.g., regular expressions), it has become essential to develop in-transit data categorization that performs real-time data analysis to actively monitor and secure data as it moves across services and network protocols. This IR outlines a practical framework for effective data protection using the capabilities of WebAssembly (WASM) — a platform-agnostic, in-proxy approach with compute and traffic processing capabilities (in-line, network traffic analysis at layers 4–7) that can be built and deployed to execute at native speed in a sandboxed and fault-tolerant manner.

The public comment period for this initial public draft is open through August 1, 2024. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page ii of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy – Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.