ELLIIT LU P01: WP5 Trustworthy operation and management

5G networks will see in an increased use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), and large scale use of small cell equipment. This poses challenges in management and in achieving trustworthy solutions. The combined research that our two groups conduct falls into this scope and covers the area of Trusted Computing (TC) techniques for, and management of, infrastructure equipment.

We investigate how TC can be specialized for VNFs in telco grade infrastructures with high demands on availability and long life time. Particularly we study how policies can, and should, be defined and implemented using Trusted Computing Group technology. For equipment management we study Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC), a promising alternative to RBAC. However, despite an intuitive simplicity, ABAC is still a newcomer in a more general ICT contexts and a number of challenges are known to exist. In our work we systematically investigate if, and possibly how, ABAC can be efficiently used in the management of large telecom networks. A basis for the work will be a simulated test-bed and a set of realistic policies to be enforced which are derived using risk assessment methods applied to a prototypic network design in the application domain.

The research will be carried out with Ericsson AB as industry partner. An industrial PhD student at Ericsson, who is also a senior staff working in security for radio network products, and PhD student active in a cooperation project with Ericsson will be the main participants in this project.