Security Analysis Challenges for Future Generation Networks

Abstract

Increasing the complexity of information and telecommunications systems, networks is reaching a level beyond human ability, mainly from the security viewpoint. Currently existing technologies for managing and assuring security requirements fall down for industrial and society requirements. The statistics about vulnerabilities and attacks show that the security, reliability and availability objectives are not reached and the general threat situation is getting worst. With the deployment of Future Generation Networks (FGN), the complexity of networks, considering their architecture, speed and amount of connections, will increase exponentially. There are several proposals for the network and security architectures of FGN, but current vulnerability, threat and risk analysis methods do not appear to evaluate them. Appropriate analysis methods should have some additional new characteristics, mainly regarding their adaptation to the continuous evolution of the FGNs. In addition, the application of security counter measures will require technological improvements, which will demand further security analyses. Then this evaluates the current vulnerability, threat and risk analysis methods from the point of view of the new security requirements of FGNs. This uses autonomic and self-adaptive systems/applications for assuring the security of FGNs.

Index Terms- Network security, Future generation networks, Vulnerability, Threat, Autonomic computing, Self-adaptive systems.