NISe: Non-Invasive Secure Framework for Multi-Access Edge Computing

Abstract

To address the emerging security challenges in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), it is imperative that solutions go beyond the current infrastructure-centric measures. These methods, including authentication and access control, are insufficient to combat malware that conceals itself within ME applications. The acknowledged flaws in the ME application layer necessitate an immediate call for creative solutions. In this work, we propose a non-invasive security architecture for MEC, meticulously designed to strike a balance between performance burden and security protection capabilities. The objective of the design contains three major aspects, i.e. user experience, service density and serviceability. We conduct a thorough evaluation that enables us to quantify the significance of high bandwidth, low user experience latency and MEC serviceability. The experimental results and ablation studies indicate that our proposed method effectively balances user experience and security capabilities. This not only provides a practical and cost-effective solution but also establishes a strong precedent for the community to develop a secure MEC with superior performance in real-world production environments.