Software-Defined Network Security

Introduction

Changing business and consumer demands in technology have transformed the perspective of networking. Rather than the former person-to-person or person-to-computer interactions, with the rapidly spreading Internet of Things (IoT) and smart devices, the world has become a complete “anything-to-anything” connected network. From this perspective, connection to anything anytime and anywhere is perceived as the most basic requirement for very near future. All these paradigm changes entail quite significant improvements to adopt requirements of the future networks. For example, the key performance indicators (KPI) of 5G networks directly infer the technological exigence of the near future. These indicators include more than 1 Gbps data rate with ultimately 1ms end-to-end latency. 99% availability and reliability are also expected even in high-device density which supports nearly 10,000 per km² (Fallgren, Spapis, Qi, Martín- Sacristán, Carrasco, … Fresia, 2016). However, it is not possible for present mobile networks to address the 1000x key performance requirements of 5G because of their limitations.

Today, the networking infrastructures are very complex and hard-to-be-operated as they reflect outdated technological requirements which belong a decade ago. They lack common control functions and interfaces and network operators have to separately configure network devices using vendor-defined commands to apply the high-level management policies (Kim & Feamster, 2013). It obliges the existing mobile networks to be structured with vendor locked-in and the dedicated hardware and software. These components implement such network functions which are not only prone to misconfiguration but also costly and require trained/expert administrators (Goransson, Black & Culver, 2016). Besides, from a security point of view, since network policies are tightly bundled to physical resources instead of services and applications, today’s solutions are strained to deploy, manage, program and scale the security throughout heterogeneous equipment from multiple vendors. To enforce consistent security policies through computing, storage, and network domains and especially across multiple data centers is very difficult. It should be noted that there is no end-to-end solution for security orchestration across data center networks today (Ahmad, Namal, Ylianttila, & Gurtov, 2015). Eventually, all those limitations significantly reduce flexibility and slow down the evolution of the infrastructure for the future networks (McBride, Cohn, Deshpande, Kaushik, Mathews, & Nathan, 2013; Liyanage, Ylianttila, & Gurtov, 2015).