Programmable Security in the Age of Software-Defined Infrastructure

Today's network and computing infrastructure rests on inadequate foundations. An emerging, promising new foundation for computing is software-defined infrastructure (SDI), which offers a range of technologies including: compute, storage, and network virtualization; novel separation of concerns at the systems level; and new approaches to system and device management. As a representative example of SDI, software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that decouples the control logic from the closed and proprietary implementations of traditional network data plane infrastructure. SDN is now becoming the networking foundation for cloud/data-center, future Internet and 5G infrastructures. We argue that we should leverage software-defined infrastructure to design new methodologies and principles to make security programmable. In this talk, I will discuss some new opportunities as well as challenges in this new direction, and demonstrate with case studies from our recent research results. Our vision is that future security will be programmable thus more intelligent and powerful to secure a software-defined world.