Rule Anomaly-Free Mechanism of Security Function Chaining in 5G

Abstract

To meet the urgent security demands, 5G aims to deploy virtualized and programmable security services and defense potential threats in real time. With the development of network function virtualization and software-defined networking, security functions can be dynamically and flexibly chained to cope with many types of malicious attacks. Although there are a number of studies on security function chaining for the 5G, they primarily focus on the security function composition, rather than rule enforcement. In fact, the misconfiguration of rules for security functions is notably common because of the security function diversity and rule heterogeneity that causes many unexpected and serious problems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a priority-based anomaly-free mechanism with defined security rule anomalies. To avoid misconfiguration, we also propose and implement a simply configured rule management framework with anomaly resolution. With extensive performance evaluations, we show the availability and efficiency of our proposed mechanism to resolve security rule anomalies.