MMTD: MANO-Based Moving Target Defense for Corporate Networks

The network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for reliable and efficient operation of network infrastructure, while keeping it secure. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology are emerging as key trends of network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and significant cost savings. On the other hand, the cybersecurity within telecommunication networks has been developed exponentially in the last decade - as more threats appear, technology evolves and business requirements change. One of the most promising trends in cyber defense are Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques. It's an approach that confuses cyber attackers by making the attack surface dynamic, and thus harder to probe and infiltrate. It's a new technique that represents a significant shift in cyber defense, which has primarily focused on the passive defense of static networks only. The paper describes the concept of the application of combined NFV and SDN technologies to provide a unique platform for implementing MTD techniques for securing the network infrastructure by morphing the logical view of the network topology.