Threats Against the Virtual Machine Environment of NFV

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an implementation of cloud computing that leverages virtualization technology to provide on-demand network functions such as firewalls, domain name servers, etc., as software services. One of the methods that help us understand the design and implementation process of such a new system in an abstract way is architectural modeling. Architectural modeling can be presented through UML diagrams to show the interaction between different components and its stakeholders. Also, it can be used to analyze the security threats and the possible countermeasures to mitigate the threats. In this paper, we show some of the possible threats that may jeopardize the security of NFV. We use misuse patterns to analyze misuses based on privilege escalation and VM escape threats. The misuse patterns are part of an ongoing catalog, which is the first step toward building a security reference architecture for NFV.