Distributed AI-based Security for Massive Numbers of Network Slices in 5G & Beyond Mobile Systems

The envisioned massive deployment of network slices in 5G and beyond mobile systems makes the shift towards zero-touch, scalable and secure slice lifecycle management a necessity. This is to harvest the benefits of network slicing in enabling profitable services. These benefits will not be attained without ensuring a high level security of the created network slices and the underlying infrastructure, above all in a zero-touch automated fashion. In this vein, this paper presents the architecture of an innovative network slicing security orchestration framework, being developed within the EU H2020 MonB5G project. The framework leverages the potential of Security as a Service (SECaaS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to foster fully-distributed, autonomic and fine-grained management of network slicing security from the node level to the end-to-end and inter-slice levels.