FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study

Amine Barrak; Emna Ksontini; Ridouane Atike; Fehmi Jaafar

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arXiv · 2509.04328

FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study

Amine Barrak·Emna Ksontini·Ridouane Atike·Fehmi Jaafar

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Abstract

Serverless computing significantly alters software development by abstracting infrastructure management and enabling rapid, modular, event-driven deployments. Despite its benefits, the distinct characteristics of serverless functions, such as ephemeral execution and fine-grained scalability, pose unique security challenges, particularly in open-source platforms like OpenFaaS. Existing approaches typically address isolated phases of the DevSecOps lifecycle, lacking an integrated and comprehensive security strategy. To bridge this gap, we propose FaaSGuard, a unified DevSecOps pipeline explicitly designed for open-source serverless environments. FaaSGuard systematically embeds lightweight, fail-closed security checks into every stage of the development lifecycle-planning, coding, building, deployment, and monitoring-effectively addressing threats such as injection attacks, hard-coded secrets, and resource exhaustion. We validate our approach empirically through a case study involving 20 real-world serverless functions from public GitHub repositories. Results indicate that FaaSGuard effectively detects and prevents critical vulnerabilities, demonstrating high precision (95%) and recall (91%) without significant disruption to established CI/CD practices.

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Amine Barrak, Emna Ksontini, Ridouane Atike, Fehmi Jaafar. 2025-09-04. FaaSGuard: Secure CI/CD for Serverless Applications -- An OpenFaaS Case Study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04328

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