Reflections after 5G Transformer plenary

Last week I had the opportunity to assist to a 5G Transformer plenary. It was hosted by IRT bcom, here in Rennes. This project, which belongs to the European Commission, has the objective to transform today’s mobile transport network into an SDN/NFV-based Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (MTP). With this, incorporate the Network Slicing paradigm into mobile transport networks, empowering the operator to provision and manage MTP slices designed to fulfill specific needs of vertical industries.

This was a great experience, on two planes. On the personal one, it was great to meet people with tons of experience and expertise. Each one with unique points of view about the proposed challenges, with disposition to share and construct knowledge. It was interesting to experience the openness to listen: I had the opportunity to talk with some of them about my thesis and provided valuable feedback and references to explore further. On the technical plane, seems like their problems are also my problems about network slicing, how to orchestrate the resources and abstract correctly the resources for consumers. I also witnessed the importance of the participation of stakeholders like telecom operators and the automotive industry into the plenary, because provide concrete use cases and practical views on the subject. 

 One aspect that caught my attention was the trade-off between the desire to provide a complete architecture (one that looks into the future, that is flexible enough to embrace the use cases we still have not thought of) and the complex task of explaining this architecture to a stakeholder. I sensed that there was a inner desire to avoid complexity and just provide an architecture for a simple scenario, that is easy to support and communicate. I sincerely dislike this approach, since we would be limiting the scope of the architecture to simple use cases. 

Future scenarios will involve intensive mobility management, frequent handover, heterogeneous (access and core) networks spanning through multiple domains and administrative boundaries. Do you need to support and push forward ($$€€) this complex idea to a stakeholder? Call a marketing guy, which I am sure can come up with a business idea that would support the use case. We have to aim higher and try to cover as many scenarios as possible. Make the architecture as flexible and open as possible. This will ensure that all sectors of society are included and that technology will find a way to contribute not only to industries, government, cities, but to benefit people, enhancing its quality of living. We need to focus on humanity.

Or maybe there were other interests behind that I could not grasp at the moment, who knows. In either case, it was a great experience, I learned a lot, and had a view of the complexity of putting a large audience on the same page, the difficult task of persuading people, how to lead a technical discussion and the different methods that can be used to present ideas and technical information. 

European Cyber Week à Rennes: Cybersecurity of Internet of Things

The last session of the European Cyber Week had a focus on IoT .

The key messages in this session were:

• Even though that the approach to security has to be end-to-end, each layer of the SOA for IoT (sensing layer, network layer, service layer, interface layer) must try to enforce its own security mechanism. Each layer as its own weaknesses.
• The security mindset has to be used since the conception of the service. As an example, the election of the sensors and actuators plays an important role, because they are manufactured by third party companies that seek economy, fast delivery, sell millions of devices at a very low cost. It is common that their security mechanisms on those systems on chips are not the best. 
• Since R8, 3GPP has pushed evolution towards LTE-A and LTE-A Pro. The standardization entity has designed mechanisms to enable IoT systems to reduce power consumption, expose services via Service Capability Exposure Function (SCEF)... and well, 5G seeks to enhance escalability by providing the same architecture no matter the radio access technology of the IoT system. The new generation core would receive traffic from heterogeneous access technologies.
• For a service operator, the cloud plays a key role, not only as a "place" where data is received, processed and stored, but as a central intelligence analysis center in order to detect anomalous activity and deploy countermeasures: detecting evil behavior is necessary, but trying to dynamically deploy the defense mechanism is also important. 
• Since at the end all is measured with numbers (costs and return of investment), there is a trade-off between how exigent is the SLA provided (availability, integrity and confidentiality) for the data and the analysis of the risk of being compromised. I think that the parameters of risk could be the value of the data, how important it is for the business, the additional latency and decreased battery life for a sensor when a full security scheme is deployed. Parameters are countless. 
• I think that some of the challenges for IoT regarding security (scalability, interoperability, management, security and privacy) can be addressed via the network slicing concept. This by providing means to escalate the network resources as needed and by deploying IDS/IPS functions on-demand, where needed. The isolation that a network slice provides could enable the contention of an attack by creating network honeypots or quarantine slices to contain malicious or suspicious activity. Feedback loops and OSS/BSS interaction is important to achieve this.

From my point of view, the service operators have no awareness of where is the service implemented inside the cloud. they are blind to the physical location of the functions. And well, should they worry? they just need the service, don't care how it is implemented. For them, something important is that the SLA promised by the cloud provider are accomplished properly. It is inside a network slice? it is in a physical dedicated server? it is up to the communications service provider to make the decision and deploy the best infrastructure for the customer.

This whole week was amazing. Has given me great view of the importance of security for industry and all the requirements that an architecture should support in order to meet the exigencies of the (new) use cases that industry and other actors would be implementing.

European Cyber Week à Rennes: Cybersecurity and healthcare focus day

For me, the key conference today was The Future of Healthcare – Scotland: paving the way, by Pr. William (Bill) BUCHANAN (@billatnapier). This conference blew my mind away.

It is known for all of us that the current technologies that we use to access Internet and the services built over it, use inventions developed more than 30 years ago. Improvements to the web, IP and TCP have been made by patching new features over them or creating new layers over them to provide new functions. And it is not only IP, or TCP: this involves also the use of STP on L2 networks, or BGP as a protocol used on Internet route announcement (and now inside data centers). Attention please, those layers are not like abstraction layers, but layers that obscure and makes difficult the operation of the system. We are using the same old tools to try to fix new problems envisioned by the massive growth of the Internet ecosystem and all the services that are supported. As suggested by Prof. Buchanan, a master reset should be done, in order to re-create the foundations of Internet having a security framework in mind.  But so far, we know this is very difficult. Just check out the example of IPv6, in which its adoption has had a low pace, because of the lack of incentive$ for telecoms to fully deploy it. All is about businesses and the return of investment after a change in a network. 

The key message here is that we are in the middle of a great opportunity to “make things right” in the foundation of the standardization process for 5G. Learn from the old technologies, have a security and privacy mindset in the implementation. The network may be seen by others like a dumb pipe, but the communication service operators are the aggregators of those pipes, and have to make sure that those pipes behave well and do not mess one with another. On the other hand, the deployment of (virtual) network functions and applications should be taken care too: this because 5G relies on software to provide functionality and is easily corruptible. How to make sure that the (virtual) network function is issued by a trusted entity? How I make sure that the orders from OSS/BSS are legitimate?

Assorted ideas in my conversation with Prof. Buchanan: encryption should be made on the source of data generation, or near the edge. The user must have the power over the data. The network must provide the necessary QoS according to the type of data, but  has to be agnostic to the content: the operator must not know about the data.

On the other side, since this focus day is centered on healthcare, convinces me once more on my quest to have a human approach of technology: to empower, enable him to pursue its dreams, to protect  the user and his data. This way, people will trust the system.

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.