Towards Autonomous Security Assurance in 5G Infrastructures

Abstract

5G infrastructures will heavily rely on novel paradigms such as Network Function Virtualization and Service Function Chaining to build complex business chains involving multiple parties. Although virtualization of security middleboxes looks a common practice today, we argue that this approach is inefficient and does not fit the peculiar characteristics of virtualized environments. In this paper, we outline a new paradigm towards autonomous security assurance in 5G infrastructures, leveraging service orchestration for semi-autonomous management and reaction, yet decoupling security management from service graph design. Our work is expected to improve the design and deployment of complex business chains, as well as the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques over large and intertwined security datasets. We describe the overall concept and architecture, and discuss in details the three architectural layers. We also report preliminary work on implementation of the system, by introducing relevant technologies.