State of the Art and Research Challenges in the Security Technologies of Network Function Virtualization

In recent years, network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn considerable attention due to its potential for service agility and low total cost of ownership. As the core of an NFV implementation, security issues in the management and control platform must be comprehensively addressed—from architectural concept to deployment. In this article, we first analyze the state of the security architecture based on ETSI-NFV, and then propose useful security practices for an NFV-based management and control ecosystem. To encourage future research, we also identify the ongoing research challenges and open security issues relevant to the NFV.