SHIELD is an EU-funded project, targeting at the design and development of a novel cybersecurity framework, which offers security-as-a-Service in an evolved telco environment. The SHIELD framework leverages NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and SDN (Software-Defined Networking) for virtualization and dynamic placement of virtualised security appliances in the network (virtual Network Security Functions - vNSFs), Big Data analytics for real-time incident detection and mitigation, as well as attestation techniques for securing both the infrastructure and the services. This papers discusses key use cases and requirements for the SHIELD framework and presents a high-level architectural approach.

Small and medium enterprises are significantly hampered by cyber-threats as they have inherently limited skills and financial capacities to anticipate, prevent, and handle security incidents. The EU-funded PALANTIR project aims at facilitating the outsourcing of the security supervision to external providers to relieve SMEs/MEs from this burden. However, good practices for the operation of SME/ME assets involve avoiding their exposure to external parties, which requires a tightly defined and timely enforced security policy when resources span across the cloud continuum and need interactions. This paper proposes an innovative architecture extending Network Function Virtualisation to externalise and automate threat mitigation and remediation in cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. Our contributions include an ontology for the decision-making process, a Fault-and-Breach-Management-based remediation policy model, a framework conducting remediation actions, and a set of deployment models adapted to the constraints of cloud, edge, and on-premises environment(s). Finally, we also detail an implementation prototype of the framework serving as evaluation material.

The EU-funded PALANTIR project proposes a cybersecurity framework combining privacy assurance, data protection, incident detection and recovery aspects under the same platform. The project main focus is on cyber-resilience of SMEs and compliance with the relevant data privacy and protection regulations. The outcomes of the project will be validated in diverse application areas (eHealth, eCommerce, 5G-MEC) and will provide enterprises with security tools that will boost their resilience at a reasonable cost to protect their assets in the ever evolving cyber threat range.

International cooperation on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), crossing the boundaries of Europe, the Americas and Asia, builds a strong foundation for pursuing experimental research through advanced programmable network testbeds. The EU-Japan jointly-funded project FELIX (FEderated Testbeds for Large-scale Infrastructure eXperiments) considers the definition of a common framework for federated Future Internet (FI) testbeds, which are dispersed across continents. This framework will enable an experimenter to (i) request and obtain resources across different testbed infrastructures dynamically; (ii) manage and control the network paths connecting the federated SDN testbed infrastructures; (iii) monitor the underlying resources; and (iv) use distributed applications executed on the federated infrastructures. This paper details six use cases that will be employed to validate the FELIX architecture and software platforms. We present our analysis and end-user considerations, highlighting the necessity to have a global vision of issues within the testbed network. Resource reachability and coherent use of physical connections are key factors in the use cases. This is particularly important when considering the simultaneous use of different technologies such as OpenFlow and the Network Service Interface (NSI) among others.

The lack of high-performance RINA (Recursive InterNetwork Architecture) implementations to date makes it hard to experiment with RINA as an underlay networking fabric solution for different types of networks, and to assess RINA’s benefits in practice on scenarios with high traffic loads. High-performance router implementations typically require dedicated hardware support, such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) or specialized ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). With the advance of hardware programmability in recent years, new possibilities unfold to prototype novel networking technologies. In particular, the use of the P4 programming language for programmable ASICs holds great promise for developing a RINA router. This paper details the design and part of the implementation of the first P4-based RINA interior router, which reuses the layer management components of the IRATI Linux-based RINA implementation and implements the data-transfer components using a P4 program. We also describe the configuration and testing of our initial deployment scenarios, using ancillary open-source tools such as the P4 reference test software switch (BMv2) or the P4Runtime API.