Evolving defense mechanism for future network security

The past few years have witnessed revolutionary advances in network technology. Along with new techniques such as SDN come lots of new network security challenges. Conventional network security mechanisms are incompetent to overcome these challenges, since they are built on a static network configuration that facilitates attackers in finding the weaknesses of a network. In this article, we conceive a novel conceptual network security mechanism, the evolving defense mechanism (EDM), to resolve current and future security problems. EDM is based on a bio-inspired idea of network configuration variations. According to the security requirements of the system, the user, and the network security state, EDM selects an efficient network configuration variation strategy to prevent corresponding security threats. Combined with SDN implementation, EDM resolves security problems from a new angle and is capable of evolving with new network security technology. We sketch a way to implement EDM and present its reference framework, which serves as an ecosystem and coexisting environment for various kinds of network configuration variations. The proposed mechanism avoids the deficiency of conventional mechanisms and has potential to cope with emerging security threats.