A novel approach for security function graph configuration and deployment

Network virtualization increased the versatility in enforcing security protection, by easing the development of new security function implementations. However, the drawback of this opportunity is that a security provider, in charge of configuring and deploying a security function graph, has to choose the best virtual security functions among a pool so large that makes manual decisions unfeasible. In light of this problem, the paper proposes a novel approach for synthesizing virtual security services by introducing the functionality abstraction. This new level of abstraction allows to work in the virtual level without considering the different function implementations, with the objective to postpone the function selection jointly with the deployment, after the configuration of the virtual graph. This novelty enables to optimize the function selection when the pool of available functions is very large. A framework supporting this approach has been implemented and it showed adequate scalability for the requirements of modern virtual networks.