In the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) era, it is critical to enable dynamic network access control. Traditionally, network access control policies are statically predefined as router entries or firewall rules. SDN enables more flexibility by re-actively installing flow rules into the switches to achieve dynamic network access control. However, SDN is limited in capturing network anomalies, which are usually important signs of security threats. In this paper, we propose to employ anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to capture network anomalies and generate SDN flow rules to enable dynamic network access control. We gain the knowledgemore »
Modeling and Mitigating Security Threats in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
By virtualizing proprietary hardware networking devices, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) allows agile and cost-effective deployment of diverse network services for multiple tenants on top of the same physical infrastructure. As NFV relies on virtualization, and as an NFV stack typically involves several levels of abstraction and multiple co-resident tenants, this new technology also unavoidably leads to new security threats. In this paper, we take the first step toward modeling and mitigating security threats unique to NFV. Specifically, we model both cross-layer and co-residency attacks on the NFV stack. Additionally, we mitigate such threats through optimizing the virtual machine (VM) placement with respect to given constraints. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.
- Editors:
- Singhal, A.; Vaidya, J.
- Award ID(s):
- 1822094
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10276703
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 34th Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec 2020)
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 3-23
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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