A Survey on Interfaces to Network Security Functions in Network Virtualization

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) opens new opportunities and challenges for security community. Unlike existing physical network infrastructure, in a virtualized network platform, security services can be dynamically deployed and maintained to cope with the threat of sophisticated network attacks that are increasing over time. This paper surveys the activity that many security vendors and Internet service providers are trying to define common interfaces for NFV-based security services through the analysis of use cases and related technologies. This activity is currently lead by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that is an international Internet standardization organization.