DeplOyment and seCurisaTion of new functiOnalities in virtualized networking enviRonment – DOCTOR

Network operators are looking very carefully for potential opportunities and possible revenues before deploying new network equipment. This equipment is often designed for a specific usage, proprietary, and running on a specific hardware; making it very expensive to integrate (e.g. sizing, implementing, configuring and managing). Since the decision to deploy such devices follows a logic based on RoI (Return of Investment), this drastically limits the ambition of network operators and the innovation in the network they operate. For example, network operators are reluctant to globally deploy a Content-Centric Networking (CCN) solution, a novel networking paradigm, proposing an Internet data plane that shifts from host-based network mechanisms to content-based ones, even if it could be considered as a promimsing stack.
The NFV (Network Virtualization Function) approach, defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), has recently emerged to implement and progressively deploy network functions and protocols in software that can run on a large range of standard commodity server hardware at low cost.
The DOCTOR project provides a major push towards the adoption of these new standards by enabling secure use of virtualized network equipment, which will ease the deployment of novel networking architectures. In the project, we will take the use-case of CCN as an example of a new emerging stack. We will investigate the co-existence of IP and CCN, and the progressive migration of traffic from one stack to the other in a virtualized environment. To reach this aim, we advocate a practical methodology consisting of setting up a real testbed. This testbed will allow real end-users (students from the academics partners) to access real web sites (e.g., YouTube, DailyMotion, etc.) using the developed virtualized networking environment, hosting the CCN networking stack in parallel with IP. The deployed testbed will provide real traces and give feedback to guide our research, targeting to improve the monitoring and security aspects of the virtualized architecture.
Monitoring and security are primary operator requirements that need to be assured before deploying new solutions. In DOCTOR, we will investigate how to monitor networks stacks deployed in a virtualized environment, regarding: the type of information to monitor, the way to collect it and the way to analyse/correlate the information gathered. This monitored data will be useful for security purposes. Leveraging a virtualized networking technology requires a full rethought of the way the security has to be designed, implemented and orchestrated. In DOCTOR, we will focus on the secure deployment, attack detection and mitigation, for protocols deployed in an NFV framework as network functions.
The DOCTOR consortium (Orange, Thales, Montimage, CNRS-LORIA, ICD) is very complementary and provides the necessary expertise and skills: network operator, security experts, monitoring solution providers and recognized academic partners operating security labs at the national level.
The project outcomes will have a major impact on the industrial partners' evolution. Deploying a virtualized infrastructure will allow Orange to innovate more in the network and offer new opportunities to its customers (both end-users and B2B customers). Thales will integrate results of the project into their Cyber Operational Centers (CYBELS) offer, such as the assessment of novel vulnerabilities related to virtualized networking environments that add considerable value to their existing offer. Montimage will extend its monitoring (MMT) solution with the project's outcomes related to monitoring, security inspection and performance analysis, in order to provide customized solutions in the field of virtualized function monitoring.