Security-Awareness in Network Virtualization: A Classified Overview

Network virtualization is a promising solution to overcoming ossification of the current Internet. With the support of Software Defined Networking components, the Service Provider can customize the network request as a virtual network, which is agilely implemented in the physical network managed by the Infrastructure Provider. In the literature, extensive works have studied the enabling technologies of network virtualization, with a focus on the virtual network embedding (VNE) problem that allocates substrate resources to instantiate the virtual network request. Very limited work, however, has taken the security aspects of network virtualization into account. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of the security issues in network virtualization. Under different criteria, we classify possible security attacks into various categories. For security issues that are related to the VNE process, we model and define the Security-Aware Network Embedding problem, and address it with an optimal framework. We also discuss other security issues that are independent of the VNE process.