Security is one of the
biggest challenges of “Softwarization”. The expected high levels of
programmability of the future Telecom infrastructure will allow creating and
customizing dynamically “slices” of virtual resources spanning from the
Terminals through the Network up to the Cloud Computing.
In order to achieve the
desired levels of dynamism and openness of the future service ecosystems
(running upon these virtualized Telecom infrastructures), whilst ensuring
security, the control, management and orchestration processes require to be
highly secure and trusted (as there will be interfaces exposed to public
access).
A way to achieve that is
ensuring that any control, management and orchestration command, transaction
will have to be properly traced (associated to the “reason why”) and eventually
authenticated.
The “infrastructure
slice” will have to become a sort of trusted entity, operated with automated
processes. Message authentication in Network and IT is not a new story.
But, what might create a
difference, today, is the applicability of “blockchain technology” for the
future security requirements: just think about the authentication of Users
(humans and/or agents), but also any commands and messages, or resources belonging
to other domains, etc.
A block chain is a
distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of data records
hardened against tampering and revision. The blockchain is seen as the main
technological innovation of Bitcoin, since it stands as proof of all the
transactions on the network.
A block is the ‘current’
part of a blockchain which records some or all of the recent transactions, and
once completed goes into the blockchain as permanent database. Each time a
block gets completed, a new block is generated. The blockchain database is
shared by all nodes participating in a system.
Will blockchain be a
game changer also in this direction of transforming "network slices"
or even "service chains" in trusted entities ?
It should be mentioned
that blockchain transaction recording require time spans that might
be too long for keeping track of all potential interactions One should
consider limiting its use to those transaction which don’t have real time
contraints. The other problem is scalability, as well.
There is nice white
paper at this link:
...in any case it poses
interesting "uberization" perspectives...