Securing Edge Networks with Securebox
This addresses security for home and enterprise networks with connected devices, offering an incremental improvement by integrating SDN and cloud into a unified solution.
The paper tackles security threats in edge networks from mobile and IoT devices by proposing Securebox, a cloud-driven Security-as-a-Service solution using Software-Defined Networking, which achieves automatic network security with low management overhead.
The number of mobile and IoT devices connected to home and enterprise networks is growing fast. These devices offer new services and experiences for the users; however, they also present new classes of security threats pertaining to data and device safety and user privacy. In this article, we first analyze the potential threats presented by these devices connected to edge networks. We then propose Securebox: a new cloud-driven, low cost Security-as-a-Service solution that applies Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to improve network monitoring, security and management. Securebox enables remote management of networks through a cloud security service (CSS) with minimal user intervention required. To reduce costs and improve the scalability, Securebox is based on virtualized middleboxes provided by CSS. Our proposal differs from the existing solutions by integrating the SDN and cloud into a unified edge security solution, and by offering a collaborative protection mechanism that enables rapid security policy dissemination across all connected networks in mitigating new threats or attacks detected by the system. We have implemented two Securebox prototypes, using a low-cost Raspberry-PI and off-the-shelf fanless PC. Our system evaluation has shown that Securebox can achieve automatic network security and be deployed incrementally to the infrastructure with low management overhead.