cSFC: Building Credible Service Function Chain on the Cloud

Shengsheng Yao, Mingwei Xu, Qi Li, Jiahao Cao, Qiyang Song

Abstract: To reduce the management costs, outsourcing network function (NF) to the cloud becomes prevalent in enterprises. This trend is increasing with the advent of network function virtualization (NFV). However, such outsourcing cannot guarantee the order and security of service function chains(SFCs) as the cloud is susceptible to attacks. In this paper, we introduce credible SFC (cSFC), a practical scheme to build secure service function chains on the untrusted cloud, cooperating with encrypted transport protocols. cSFC simultaneously shields NFs from an untrusted cloud and preserves the order of SFC sequence. Meanwhile, this scheme supports a wide range of NF functionalities and preserves the privacy of session data. We implement the cSFC prototype, and the evaluation result shows that it is practical with acceptable performance.