Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on Security in Emerging Networking Technologies

Abstract

The papers in this special section examine security in emerging networking technologies. Network infrastructure is undergoing a major shift away from ossified hardware-based networks to programmable software-based networks. One compelling example of this paradigm shift is the advent of Software- Defined Networking (SDN). A traditional network mixes control and traffic processing logic in single hardware devices, making the network more complex and harder to manage. SDN has addressed this issue by decoupling the control plane in network devices from the data plane to simplify production networks. On the other hand, enterprise networks are populated with a large number of proprietary and expensive hardware-based middleboxes, such as firewall, IDS/IPS, and load balancing. Hardware-based middleboxes present significant drawbacks such as high costs, management complexity, slow time to market, and unscalability. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was proposed as another new network paradigm to address those drawbacks by replacing hardware-based network functions with virtualized software systems running on generic and inexpensive commodity hardware. Given their benefits, SDN and NFV have recently attracted significant attention from both academia and industry.