Introduction
Information security is an elusive but essential quality of modern computer systems. Implementing secure design principles involves different techniques depending on the domain, but core concepts apply regardless of architecture, language, or layers of abstraction. Data pipelines, whether streaming, batch, structured, or multimodal, require careful security and governance no less than the networks and services that provide foundational capabilities. Secure data pipeline design builds on best practices from several disciplines, and begins with establishing safeguards at the point of initial ingestion.
Designing secure data pipelines is a concern that cuts across both organizational and technical boundaries. Standard practices such as threat modeling and risk assessment are important, along with network boundary protection, access control, and comprehensive observability. Protecting data pipelines requires a holistic approach that considers all possible sources and destinations. Data pipeline security involves applying these concepts to automated processes in a scalable manner. Focusing on the mode and shape of data sources provides a useful starting point for architecting secure data pipelines.
Ingest Security Strategies
Implementing data pipeline security is a subject to consider from multiple perspectives, but beginning with data source handling is helpful from both a logical and technical point of view. Adopting secure ingest strategies avoids a number of potential pitfalls and provides a solid basis for evaluating subsequent processing and routing decisions.
The following seven strategies should be applied when building new data pipelines or evaluating existing flows:
- Encrypt Transmissions
- Enforce Rate Limits
- Authenticate Sources
- Identify Media Types
- Validate Data Structures
- Verify Information Semantics
- Enumerate Processing Destinations
Encrypt Transmissions
Confidential communication is a fundamental requirement for interconnected systems. Encrypting data transmission not only shields details from intermediaries, but also provides a measure of data integrity protection in certain modes of operation. Transport encryption is a core component of zero trust architecture, which emphasizes secure communication from end to end. Every unencrypted transmission is an opportunity for compromise, so implementing encryption from one end of the data pipeline to the other is essential.
Standard network protocols provide a common foundation for encrypted communication. HTTPS is ubiquitous and TLS is the de facto standard for encrypted application protocols. SSH also remains popular for both secure remote access and protected data transfer using SFTP. Virtual Private Networking protocols can provide an additional layer of protection, particularly for application protocols that do not support Transport Layer Security. Beyond transport protocols, robust client-side encryption with modern algorithms provides an additional layer of security, particularly in the context of shared storage services.
Both TLS and SSH are open standards with widespread adoption, making them ideal building blocks for secure flows. As with most standards, however, protocol versions and cipher algorithms must be configured to achieve sufficient security. Limiting supported modes to cipher algorithms that provide authenticated encryption, such as AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305, combine integrity and confidentiality at a level that avoids the pitfalls of other solutions. Although the topic of encryption has its own set of complexities, following current industry standards satisfies both security and compliance requirements.
Enforce Rate Limits
Scalable computing resources give the appearance of unbounded capacity, but every system has inherent constraints. Denial-of-Service attacks highlight these boundaries in visible ways, emphasizing the importance of protecting systems from resource exhaustion. Data pipelines can be designed to expand or contract based on relative demand, but placing thoughtful guardrails avoids unexpected charges and unplanned outages.
Intelligent rate limiting should be enforced at logical system boundaries, with a particular focus on operations that consume significant processing resources. Setting a maximum input size for files or records prevents misconfigured or malicious clients from degrading the performance of a data pipeline. Enforcing a maximum number of requests or events in a given time window is another general approach. Scoping input limits based on common client identifiers provides fine-grained control, but client-based tracking can incur its own resource costs, requiring its own set of boundaries. The optimal rate limiting implementation combines both coarse-grained boundaries with fine-tuned controls for clients with positive identification.
Authenticate Sources
Some types of logging and telemetry pipelines depend on collection from a trusted local network, which limits identification options to source address and port number. Other protocols support stronger identification methods using certificates or tokens. Mutual TLS provides both encrypted communication and peer authentication, but it does not necessarily provide positive identification of the data itself. Building secure data pipelines starts with robust source identification, but in some scenarios, network authentication is not enough.
For secure data pipelines, strong authentication should include more than identifying the client or server providing the information to be processed. Source authentication for data pipeline should also incorporate some measure of integrity checking or cryptographic signing.
Data formats that incorporate cryptographic hashing as a first-class feature provide some measure of tamper protection. Processing strategies that use hash-based message authentication codes support stronger security guarantees based on knowledge of a shared key. Cryptographic signing builds on strong hashing and uses asymmetric key pairs to associate data with a known sender. Elliptic-curve cryptography algorithms such as Ed25519 present performant solutions for authenticating data sources at the earliest point of relevance. Coupled with network authentication, data source identification based on cryptographic signatures enables secure data processing across multiple system boundaries.
Identify Media Types
With roots in email messaging, the concept of a media type provides a concise and extensible way to label a collection of bytes. From a generic tag for a binary stream, to a specific label for a custom archive containing structured metadata, a well-defined media type enables basic data routing. Proper media type identification is essential for multimodal data pipelines where operations on event records are different from processing applied to audio streams. Media type identification is also a critical component for secure processing, as malformed inputs consume valuable processing cycles.
Client-based data sources can assert the content type, but a robust flow design includes identification based on the input stream. Content identification should precede structural validation, providing faster filtering of unexpected source information. In the context of file-based data pipelines, header-derived detection is a common approach. Although reading the initial bytes of a stream does not guarantee the remainder matches, it does provide a quick method for separating out corrupted sources. Depending on asserted media type without content-based determination leaves a data pipeline open to manipulation, but adding basic identification protects against potential threats.
Validate Data Structure
After identifying the general media type, validating the specific data structure provides the next level of data pipeline security. Structural validation moves beyond header-derived or sampling-based detection and ensures that the entire payload meets expected format boundaries. Data format specifications ensure that input sources contain standard delimiters, and follow required syntax constraints.
Although these requirements also fit under the heading of data governance, invalid structure can also lead to security vulnerabilities. Processing information with unexpected syntax can result in excessive memory consumption with buffering strategies that expect standard field boundaries. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system contains numerous records related to resource exhaustion when parsing invalid and unexpected inputs. Defensive software design provides the building blocks for secure data pipeline implementation, and implementing format validation serves as an additional guard against subtle structural problems.
Verify Information Semantics
Semantic verification is related to structural validation, focusing on expected content in the data itself. Data formats may allow large integers or floating point numbers, but in standard processing, the actual scope of valid information is often much smaller. A video stream may adhere to structural format requirements, but the aspect ratio or audio encoding may not meet the expectations of a particular business use case. Semantic correctness is important not only for data quality, but also for pipeline security, as individual attributes often drive computation and presentation decisions.
Complex event processing often involves aggregation operations on several fields, making the content of those fields an important factor for computed results. With the weight of business decisions on data-driven analytics, data that falls outside expected semantic boundaries presents serious risks. Whether incorrect billing charges or miscalculated customer response rates, invalid information can lead to lost opportunities or missed revenue. Incorrect semantics can also impact user-facing capabilities, such as boundary calculations for data visualization. Although these scenarios are somewhat secondary to data pipeline design, they are worth highlighting as secure ingest processing is a foundational concern. Data quality is tightly coupled to data security, and that relationship should be considered when evaluating data pipeline configuration.
Enumerate Processing Destinations
Comprehensive data pipeline security involves both sources and destinations, but for secure ingest design, making correct routing decisions is an important consideration. Although implementing rigorous authentication and verification provides a number of protections, routing and processing based on a defined set of options prevents otherwise acceptable data from introducing unexpected behavior.
For example, a data pipeline may have different paths for CSV, JSON, and XML content. It may seem easier to use an attribute as the destination itself, but what happens when that attribute contains an unexpected value? Instead, comparing against a set of supported values, and having an unmatched destination maintains positive control over the data destination. The same principle applies to other types of routing decisions, but the impact is greater when the destination is a remote server. Pushing data to a remote location using an attribute containing the server address is flexible, but it also opens the door to misdirected processing.
Conclusion
Data pipeline security is a complex topic, requiring thoughtful design and careful implementation. Protecting pipelines at the point of ingest is critical to a robust architecture, and establishing checkpoints at logical boundaries can mitigate many potential opportunities for compromise. The best solution depends on environmental factors and business needs, but evaluating and integrating basic strategies for securing data sources is crucial for modern data pipeline design.
With experience creating, maintaining, and evolving Apache NiFi, Datavolo brings the operational insight and technical expertise required for designing and scaling secure data pipelines. Whether integrating with relational databases, event streams, or vector stores, collaborating with a team that considers security as a first priority is key to deployment success. Building data pipelines with Datavolo provides a robust infrastructure foundation, enabling customers to focus on securing the next wave of data processing. Partnering with Datavolo is an opportunity to learn best practices and implement production-ready solutions for securing data pipelines from end to end.