Methods and Means of Analyzing Application Security via Distributed Tracing

The article describes methods and means of digital security that are utilizing distributed tracing to detect, investigate, and prevent security incidents. The described methods and means are applicable to solutions of any scale – from large enterprises to pet projects; of any domain – healthcare, banking, government, retail, etc. The article takes a comprehensive approach to digital security including identification, alerting, prevention, investigation, and audit of existing security incidents. Described approaches to application security via tracing are focused on general purpose applications, but they can be extended to cover a domain specific use-case. All Approaches are production tested and utilized in existing distributed IT systems in one way or another, however certain examples and use-cases are intentionally simplified for the demonstration purposes and ease of understanding. Nevertheless, it must be understood that methods and means described in the article complement existing security practices and cannot replace all of them, however they may improve overall security of the system by decreasing incident detection time, decreasing resources and efforts needed to investigate breaches or passing a security audit.