Towards Secure and Intelligent Network Slicing for 5G Networks

Network slicing is one of the emerging technologies allowing resource sharing among different network entities in 5G networks. It enables delivering smart, critical, and multi-services with distinctive requirements transiting from network as an infrastructure to network as a service setup. Although its advantages, it is facing several challenges raised from isolation and resource sharing among services leading to security issues. Security is a critical problem for network slicing as slices serving customized services with different requirements may also have different security levels and policies. Thus, considering the impact of these security issues on network slices is required when defining and designing security protocols. Addressing these challenges is necessary to protect users’ security and privacy while maintaining the required performance and QoS. Most of the existing works covered only one or more aspects of the network slicing including, architecture, taxonomy, challenges, security issues, attacks classification, possible solutions, and future scope. In this paper, we extensively investigated all these aspects and others, we analyzed how the security can be ensured inside and outside of the network slices with resource isolation, machine learning, and cryptography with an E2E security. We presented a deep review of the security issues threatening the network slicing and how to mitigate them over a multi-domain infrastructure in 5G networks. we evaluated the performance of some of these solutions in preventing malicious attacks through experiments using Open Air Interface.