Twitter reflection: PNF -> VNF -> CNF

Going from Physical Network Functions (PNF) to Virtual Network Functions (VNF) to Container-ized Network Functions (CNF). Faster and smaller footprint. How much faster/smaller can we go? Full data center in your mobile phone.

— Luis Kr (@lcsuarezt) 31 décembre 2017

European Cyber Week à Rennes, day three

My key points for the last day of the C&ESAR conferences:

• The conference I enjoyed the most was "une autre vision de lq Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) by Airbus Cybersecurity. The motive is simply the reasoning behind the threat model and the cyberdefense strategy they showed and the during the presentation. 
• Regarding the threat model, covers all the steps from motivation to perform harm, compromising the target and exploiting the vulnerability.
• About the cyberdefense strategy, covered a complete approach with:
• Strategy: administrative decisions on the defense.
• Conception: use the imagination! Architects propose a solution to the security problems.
• Tactic: the defense. How are we going to defend? Made by the security engineers. How to correlate?
• Operation: BAU. SoC, CSIRT. Technical formation to personnel.  
• This gave me a lot to think about, because having a clear threat model allows to to have a vision of how to check an architecture for weak links and possible solutions to those potential problems. At some point, we would like to have granularity of the (virtual) network functions in order to have a flexible service composition and simple lightweight functions firing up when necessary. But the problem is the multiplication of the points of failure that are created. 
• An well, securing all those points of failures have costs in terms of money, processing time, memory, delay and latency... It is a trade off with the value of what I want to protect. What is the justification for such an investment?

The afternoon session was developed in Secure-IC. The topic was about the business of digital security. The subject was a little bit more administrative to my taste (or to my interest). Some isolated comments:

• Europe has no representative in the top 10 industries in the world: first 8 are USA, last 2 of the top 10 are Chinese.
• It is a shame that all is shaped by politics, being technology also affected by this.
• 90% of advertisement in the world is captured by Google and Facebook.
• Among the technical priorities in DGA plan, they want:
• Evaluation and orientation of COTS technologies.
• Improve architecture and the resilience of large systems (ships, aircraft…) taking into account the operational constraints. 
• LOL, this sounds like they are sharing some of the functional needs of 5G along with its enabling technologies. It is a fact that SDN and NFV would help to achieve these requirements. I am imagining right now network slices for ships, aircraft, hospitals, smart cities. In fact, as the speaker said, a ship, for example, is like a smart city! has its own energy source, water supply control, temperature control, CCTV, the crew.. a small scale city.

So far, I have more ideas, more questions, more reading to do and so much to learn; got to keep going.

How to begin learning about NFV

After the last meeting with my supervisors, it was advised to leave the superficial exploratory phase and begin to have a serious understanding of the building blocks of the technologies that enable 5G. I will begin with NFV, since I believe it is "the most important" building block of the whole ecosystem.
But wait, where can I start?
Exploring the ETSI website to search for more specific information, there is a huge amount of documentation, with highly granular search criteria: this level of granularity is good in order to narrow down your search when you know what are you looking for. But.. when you are just beginning to learn about it can be difficult.

So, I think it is necessary to understand how the standardization body organizes the information, their internal working groups and how the documentation is released.

In the case of ETSI,

ETSI has several types of standards:

And according to history, the NFV initiative was industry motivated. Son NFV belongs to the ISG committee. Inside, there are several Working Groups (WG) each one focusing on a specific problem:

According to this, think that the documentation I am interested in has to do with the proposed use cases (SOL), interfaces and architecture (IFA), security (SEC) and the old (but relevant) management and orchestration (MAN) documents.

Still, I have to take care of something: The central topic is network slicing and its security. NFV is one of the enablers of the network slicing concept, it is important to get to know it, but I am not sure how deep I have to dig. I can be a little intense when reading, so I have to learn how to stop and not loose the main objective.

Service Availability and Reliability in NFV

Last semester I wrote an interesting article about the problem with service availability and reliability in NFV implementations, with special remark in LTE/EPC environments. It involved a lot of research, and describes the problem that at the moment NFV experiences when dealing with services that need "five nines" availability. The idea is that NFV is not a technology that will solve all the issues about this matter, but needs the help of other protocols, such ans SDN. At the end of the article, I state my point of view about this topic. I hope you enjoy the read.

Service Availability and Reliability in NFV