A Network Function Virtualization Architecture for Automatic and Efficient Detection and Mitigation against Web Application Malware

Abstract

This paper proposes and implements a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) security architecture to provide automatic and efficient detection and mitigation against Web application malware. The mitigation is given by dynamically chaining a Virtual Security Function (VSF) to the data stream to block malicious exploitation traffic without affecting the benign traffic. We implement an NFV Security Controller (NFV-SC) that interacts with an Intrusion Detection System and a Web Application Firewall (WAF), both implemented as VSFs. We also implement a vulnerability scanner and a mechanism to automatically create rules in advance in the WAF-VSF when a security vulnerability is found in an application, even if no malicious traffic has attempted to exploit the flaw. In addition, it dynamically identifies and removes no longer used security rules to improve performance. We implement and evaluate our security proposal in the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV). The evaluation results in our experimental scenarios show that the NFV security architecture automatically blocks 99.12% of the HTTP malicious traffic without affecting 93.6% of the benign HTTP requests. 
Finally, we show that the number of rules in the WAF-VSF severely affects the latency to load HTTP response headers and that the number of redirection OpenFlow rules within Open vSwitches is not enough to significantly impact the end-user experience in modern web browser applications.