Anomaly detection framework for SFC integrity in NFV environments

With the increasing deployments of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in both industry and academia, it becomes necessary to design mechanisms for keeping the integrity of Service Function Chains (SFC) responsible for NFV services delivering. Despite the advances in the development of management and orchestration for NFV, solutions to keep SFCs resilient to well-known and zero-day threats are still much needed. In this paper, we introduce a framework for deploying anomaly detection techniques for SFC in NFV environments. Our framework consists of a set of functional blocks with well-defined functions, composing an additional SFC Integrity Module (SIM) for the standard NFV architecture. The proposed SIM enables NFV orchestrators to analyze NFV elements and perform suggested actions with the goal of keeping service integrity in the network. The results obtained through the evaluation of a Proof-of-Concept implementation show that the proposed framework is able to properly detect different types of anomalies using entropy-based detection techniques.