Securing VNF communication in NFVI

In a modern telco cloud, network functions are performed by groups of single or interconnected virtual machines (VMs), which form virtualized network functions (VNFs). Securing these VNFs is both important and challenging, since the VNFs might be performing some mission critical operations and exchanging sensitive information among each other. The problem lies in the implementation of current cloud infrastructure where security of traffic is not considered at large. The exchanged traffic among VNFs is mostly unencrypted and subject to eavesdropping. In this paper, we present possible approaches along with the implementation setup to solve the problem of securing communication among VNFs. We also discuss performance overhead measurements of our testbed setup along with relevant challenges and directions for future work.