What is Serverless Security?

Understanding Serverless Security

Serverless Security addresses the distinct challenges of protecting applications built on Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions. This architectural pattern eliminates the need to manage servers, but introduces new security considerations as the shared responsibility model shifts significantly toward the cloud provider. Function code security becomes paramount, as developers now own this layer completely. Common serverless vulnerabilities include insecure handling of event data, over-privileged execution roles, inadequate secrets management, and dependencies with known vulnerabilities. Traditional security approaches like network monitoring have limited effectiveness since there's no persistent infrastructure to protect. Effective serverless security practices include thorough code review, proper function permissions using least privilege, runtime protection to detect abnormal behaviors, and careful API gateway configuration. Organizations adopting serverless often need to redesign their security monitoring to focus more on application behavior and less on infrastructure, which is now largely abstracted away.