Detection and mitigation of emerging attacks in virtualized Named Data Networking (NDN) environment

National audienceThe IP network, which was originally designed to merely connect two computers from a distance, is exposing its limits in front of emerging Internet users' and business' requirements which transforms the Internet in a planet-scale framework for content delivery. In this context, an evolution of current network architectures is occurring, inspired by the idea of naming content objects rather than naming nodes by IP address. Such an idea has been implemented into many Information Centric Network (ICN) proposals. Among them, Named Data Networking (NDN) [1] is the one receiving the most attentions of the research community. NDN shifts the semantics of network service, from delivering the packet to a destination, to retrieving data identified by a given name. This concept brings up important changes to the way the network works: (1) communication is driven by user requests; (2) seamless connection between content providers and users is no longer necessary; (3) mobility support is ensured by removing end-host identification and bringing in-network caches; (4) the latter in-network cache eventually increases the global content delivery performance; and finally (5) multi-path forwarding brings multicast delivery. NDN also brings in security primitives, by implementing signatures for all named data packets, and self-regulation of network traffic, through flow balance between Interest and Data packets. While NDN appears as a promising solution for the Future Internet, its deployment is still limited to dedicated research testbeds. Furthermore, its adoption by Internet Service Providers (ISP) remains a challenge due to required time and prohibitive cost of large scale deployment. However, the emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [2], a concept where network functions can be virtualized and installed over shared pools of standardized commodity hardware resources, emerges as an advantageous means to accelerate and facilitate the deployment of NDN by stakeholders. From a security perspective, NFV also brings challenges and opportunities by (1) clearly separating the infrastructure level from the virtualized one, thus bringing an intrinsic solution to malicious network function isolation, and (2) through the use of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) [3], enabling an easy configuration and orchestration of network functions. In this context 1 , the main question and subsequent research topic which is raised is: " By leveraging NFV for the deployment of NDN, what are the security threats these novel network functions expose? What are the most appropriate detection solutions and what are the related counter-measures?