Intrinsic Security: A Robust Framework for Cloud-Native Network Slicing via a Proactive Defense Paradigm

Opening-up sharing has prompted the multi-tenancy architecture, whereby different vendors (including outsourcees) work together with network operators to form a vibrant service ecosystem, resulting in several advantages as well as risks. In particular, the static nature of existing architectures in network functions virtualization-based (NFV-based) clouds facilitate hacking. Thus, much attention has been focused on determining how to avoid the uncontrollable cloud security induced by complex production relations and non-trustworthy software/hardware sources when the two sets of security risks intersect. In this article, we investigate latent persistent threats against cloud environments and determine a high degree of complementarity and consistency between the NFV-based cloud environment and the dynamic defense concept. More specifically, new NFV-based cloud features provide an effective implementation for dynamic defense, while the generalized robustness of dynamic defense theory allows for high security gains. Intrinsic cloud security (iCS) is then proposed to align NFV-based clouds, mimicking defense and the moving target defense (MTD) paradigm to implement a seamless integration and symbiosis evolution between security and NFV-based clouds. We quantify the impact on system overhead to account for efficiency and cost issues. The simulation analysis demonstrates that the enhanced mode is able to consistently obtain a more beneficial and stable defense compared with the counterparts.