Intrinsic Security and Self-Adaptive Cooperative Protection Enabling Cloud Native Network Slicing

Abstract

With the emergence of cloud native technology, the network slicing enables automatic service orchestration, flexible network scheduling and scalable network resource allocation, which profoundly affects the traditional security solution. Security is regarded as a technology independent of the cloud native architecture in the initial design, traditional passive defense such as “reinforced” and “stacked” is relied on to achieve system security protection. The lack of intrinsic security mechanisms makes the system capability insufficient when faces the uncertain threat brought by vulnerabilities and backdoors under the ecosystem of opening-up and sharing. The static nature of existing networks and computing systems makes them easy to be compromised and hard to defend, and thus it is urgent to provide intrinsic security and proactive protection against the unpredictable attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a novel paradigm named intrinsic cloud security (iCS) from the perspective of dynamic defense. The dynamic defense provides component-level security, and has complementary and consistency with the cloud native environment. In particular, iCS introduces mimic defense and moving target defense (MTD), and makes full use of the new features introduced by cloud native to implement an intrinsic and proactive defense mechanism with acceptable costs and efficiency. The iCS paradigm achieves seamless integration and symbiosis evolution between security and cloud native. We implement a trial of iCS based on 5GC commercial system and evaluate its performance on costs, efficiency and attack success. The result shows that the iCS enhanced mode always can provide a better and more stable defense effects.