Access Microservices with Zero-Knowledge, Path Certainty and Distributed Traceability

The widespread adoption of Microservices Architecture (MSA) across industries has amplified trust, privacy, and security challenges. Due to its distributed nature, the growth in data-sharing rate among microservices increases privacy concerns. These are implicit privacy risks that users are unaware of, and they rarely realize when or how their private data has been exposed. For instance, fitness trackers can leak location data via third-party app installation, while photo-sharing apps may expose it through weak APIs. Existing distributed tracing technologies provide runtime monitoring, security solutions that rely on them are retrospective. The massive trace data with excessively redundant traces further complicates real-time threat detection, especially when data can travel beyond the intended destination. Our lightweight, preplanned path traversal platform ensures authentication without exposing private data, monitors service paths, and decentralizes trust. We demonstrate experimentally that the platform enhances privacy protection and guarantees absolute path certainty. Load testing on a microservices-based system with 750 simultaneous users achieved (100 %) accuracy in blocking unauthorized path deviation. Our theoretical analysis confirms robust protection, precise path planning, and effective monitoring-delivering privacy, security, and data integrity.