Security Automation in next-generation Networks and Cloud environments

In the next generation networks and cloud systems, administrators should only need to define their intentions through simple high-level intents, leaving the system to autonomously implement them in the best way possible. The adoption of automation enables the possibility to create reactive systems that can reconfigure themselves in response to unpredictable events, such as network attacks. Nowadays, such solutions are far from being achieved. The enforcement of security requirements continues to heavily rely on manual efforts and tools requiring non-negligible expertise to be used. This results in frequent misconfiguration errors or the complete absence of default security measures due to their high implementation complexity. This paper introduces the research that will be carried out within my Ph.D. program, focusing on network security automation. The objective is to bridge existing gaps in the literature, on one side developing novel automated and intent-based approaches for security enforcement in cloud environments, ensuring formal correctness and optimization, and on the other side researching new solutions for the design of security reaction mechanisms for modern networks in response to network attacks.