Recently,
we’ve been asked what are the potential
military applications of SDN and NFV.
Well,
the first simple example in my mind concerns remote control and program of
(swarms of) drones and robots. In fact, it has been argued several time that “Softwarization” will
transform terminals, tablets, machines, smart thing, drones, robots… into
“meta-node” of SD-Infrastructures (SDI). In general, it’s easy to predict that
the availability of huge amounts of cloud processing and storage,
interconnected by highly flexible and fast SDI, will create a pervasive “machine
intelligence” able to morph space-time physical dimensions, and, in general,
the direct physical presence of humans will be required less and less to
perform certain jobs or tasks.
In
the future, technology will offer increasing capabilities and performance at
lower and lower costs, and it will be more easily accessible. SDIs are likely to become the nervous systems of future Digital Society and Economy. This will create
opportunities and risks: software is vulnerable by definition.
Future SDI will be by definition a vulnerable infrastructure that needs to be secured against attacks and made resilient. Security should be part of the smartness (i.e., we always talk about smart grids, smart cities, smart objects…etc). Possible
scenarios? It’s just a matter of “imagination”. Nevertheless, I guess it’s much
more important concentrating on how to contain the threats, or predict, tame
the risks posed by some uses of Softwarization.
Security-by-design
should be, in my opinion, one of the key top-priority avenues concerning SDN
and NFV. And, new techniques should be identified to complement the current approaches adopted in legacy infrastructures.
Softwarization, for example, could bring the
ability for security policies to follow logically specific network functions (in logical containers, VMs). More in general, cyberspace
is definitely becoming a Complex
Adaptive System: in this sense both local self-organization/emergent behaviours (with
simple rules) and global Big Data analysis (making use of methods and
algorithms for detecting suspicious data patters, anonymously) could contribute
protecting SDI (e.g., through adopting 'honeypot' approaches to detect and block SDI attacks).