Securing real world 5G MEC deployments

• Autor(a) principal: Escaleira, Pedro Miguel Nicolau
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/38905
• topic: 5G; MEC; NFV; MANO; OSM; MTD; MTDaaS; Cybersecurity

Edge Computing is a paradigm that has been gaining some popularity among the research community and the telecommunications industry, since it is viewed, by some, as a 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G) technology enabler. Some of its promises include a decrease in network latency and an increase in network throughput, by allowing computation to be performed at the Edge of the network, rather than on distant Cloud servers. These and other associated benefits are crucial for multiple businesses’ vertical use cases, such as Smart Factories, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Cities, or Big Data Analytics, among many others. However, although some standardization organizations, such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), have been gathering efforts to specify this new paradigm, there is still a lack of real implementations and evaluations of a fully functional Edge Computing architecture. By this fact, the security aspects related to this new concept have been overlooked. Most of the academic research done in that field, until this point, is more focused on the theoretical than on the practical aspects, which leads to an absence of real cybersecurity implementations that can be used in a real Edge Computing infrastructure. To this end, this dissertation aims to propose a system to enhance the security of applications deployed at the network’s Edge. Therefore, it first proposes a state of the art Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture based on the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) framework, with a Proof of Concept (PoC), to fill the gap that exists in MEC implementations. Then, with that architecture in mind, it is proposed the first Moving Target Defense as a Service (MTDaaS) mechanism to date, which allows a Telecommunications Operator to offer an MTD system that protects any of its clients’ MEC Applications. The created methodology increases the protection of an application by increasing its heterogeneity, which in this work was achieved by moving the application’s version being executed over time. The evaluation made towards the PoC of that MTDaaS methodology demonstrated an increase of the attack difficulty in all phases of the Intrusion Kill Chain, except for the Weaponization and Delivery, meaning that with the presence of this system, a potential intruder will have less success in achieving its objectives when attempting to assault a MEC Application.