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How DoS attacks can be mounted on Network Slice Broker and can they be mitigated using blockchain?

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Several recent works talk about the potential use of network slice brokering mechanism to facilitate the resource allocation of network slicing in next generation networks. This involves network tenants on the one hand and resource/infrastructure providers on the other hand. However, the potential downside of deploying Network Slice Broker (NSB) is that it can be victimized by DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Thus, the aim of this work is three fold. First, to present the possible ways in which DoS/DDoS attacks can be mounted on NSB and their adverse effects. Second, to propose and implement initial blockchain-based solution named as Security Service Blockchain (SSB) to prevent DoS attacks on NSB. Third, to enumerate the challenges and future research directions to effectively utilize blockchain for mitigating DoS/DDoS attacks on NSB. To evaluate the performance the proposed SSB framework is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric. The results manifest that the latency impact of the legitimate slice creation over scaled up malicious traffic remains minimal with the use of SSB framework. The integration of SSB with NSB results in gaining several-fold reduction in latency under DoS attack scenario.
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How DoS attacks can be mounted on Network Slice
Broker and can they be mitigated using blockchain?
Tharaka Hewa, Anshuman Kalla, Pawani Porambage, Madhusanka Liyanage§, Mika Ylianttila
∗† ‡§ Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland
§School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland
Email: ∗‡ §¶ [firstname.lastname]@oulu.fi,anshuman.kalla@ieee.org,§madhusanka@ucd.ie
Abstract—Several recent works talk about the potential use
of network slice brokering mechanism to facilitate the re-
source allocation of network slicing in next generation net-
works. This involves network tenants on the one hand and
resource/infrastructure providers on the other hand. However,
the potential downside of deploying Network Slice Broker (NSB)
is that it can be victimized by DoS (Denial of Service) attack.
Thus, the aim of this work is three fold. First, to present
the possible ways in which DoS/DDoS attacks can be mounted
on NSB and their adverse effects. Second, to propose and
implement initial blockchain-based solution named as Security
Service Blockchain (SSB) to prevent DoS attacks on NSB. Third,
to enumerate the challenges and future research directions to
effectively utilize blockchain for mitigating DoS/DDoS attacks on
NSB. To evaluate the performance the proposed SSB framework
is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric. The results manifest
that the latency impact of the legitimate slice creation over
scaled up malicious traffic remains minimal with the use of SSB
framework. The integration of SSB with NSB results in gaining
several fold reduction in latency under DoS attack scenario.
Index Terms—Network Slicing, Network Slice Brokering,
Blockchain, Smart Contracts, 5G, IoT
I. INTRODUCTION
5G mobile networks are designed with the vision to accom-
modate the diverse service requirements for different stake-
holders (e.g. Mobile Virtual Network Operators, Over The Top
service providers, and industry verticals) in telecommunication
ecosystem [1]. Thus, it is required to customize and share
same 5G physical infrastructure between these stakeholders
to satisfy their diverse service requirements. In this context,
Network Slicing (NS) [2] has emerged as one of the building
blocks of the 5G and B5G networks. Furthermore, the concept
of NSB has been introduced to better orchestrate the overall
process of NS that includes tasks like admission control of
requests from legitimate network tenants, sending across such
requests to the multiple infrastructure/resource providers, slice
negotiation, slice selection, and ensuring SLA compliance [3]–
[6]. Thus, NSB acts as a mediator to facilitate the process of
NS that enables trustworthy resource trading between multiple
vendors and stakeholders in an open market.
A. Motivation
Though NSB offers numerous advantages, nevertheless, it is
vulnerable for new security limitations and issues that can hin-
der the deployment of network slices. In particular, the issues
corresponding to DoS and DDoS attacks are envisioned to be
of high importance. In DoS/DDoS attack, the compromised
network tenants(s) and/or the compromised Mobile Network
Operators (MNOs) maliciously overwhelm NSB entity with
the intention to either slow down its working or sabotage it.
As a result, there can be adverse effects like delaying the
creation of genuine and legitimate network slices, inefficient
utilization of computational and network resources, glitches
in SLA compliance, and diminishing the trust in the network
and associated services. Hence, DoS/DDoS attacks can be a
significant impediment for the deployment of NSB service
towards network automation so it is essential to design a
mechanism to mitigate such attacks on NSB.
On one hand, there exists numerous research like [7] and
[8] that aims to secure network slices against DoS attacks. On
the other hand there are works such as [9]–[11] that intends to
deal with DoS/DDoS attacks on 5G networks. However, none
of them discuss about DoS/DDoS attacks on NSB entity.
Blockchain is a well-known Distributed Ledger Technology
(DLT), which has a huge potential to be used as a support-
ing technology for 5G and 6G networks [12]–[14]. There
have been significant number of recent works that leverage
blockchain for decentralized NSB [15]–[20]. Nevertheless, to
the best of our knowledge there exists no work that investigates
DoS/DDoS attack on NSB and utilizes blockchain to mitigate
such attacks. Table I summarizes the feature-wise position of
our work with the related works. This work uses ‘blockchain
as a service’ to mitigate DoS attacks. Some of the advantages
of blockchain-based decentralized service (over centralize ser-
vice) that motivated us to use blockchain technology are cryp-
tographically secure distributed ledger, P2P network of nodes,
consensus-based decision making, ledger comprising data and
smart contracts distributed among the nodes, non-existence of
single-point-of-failure, and transparency with pseudonymity.
B. Contribution
The contributions of this paper are as follows:
To identify the possible ways in which DoS/DDoS attacks
can vandalize the functioning of NSB.
To propose an initial blockchain-empowered smart con-
tract driven profiling mechanism — Security Service
Blockchain (SSB) — to mitigate DoS attacks on NSB.
To evaluate the performance of the proposed SSB by im-
plementing it on a hyperledger fabric based experimental
setup and discuss the obtained results.
To pin point the challenges which still need to be ad-
dressed to make NSB completely immune to DoS/DDoS
attacks.
TABLE I: Features Comparison with Key Related Works
Features
[15] [19] [18] [16] [17] [20]
SSB
DDoS prevention No No No No No No Yes
Consensus
oriented
tenant/MNO
registration
No No No No No Yes Yes
Consensus
oriented request
authorization
No Yes No No No No Yes
Dedicated
blockchain for
security
No No No No No No Yes
Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II iden-
tifies different ways of mounting DoS/DDoS attacks on NSB
and their adverse effects. Section III presents a blockchain-
based solution to mitigate DoS attack on NSB. Section IV
provides the implementation details and discusses the results.
Section V delineates the challenges paving way for future
research directions. Finally, section VI concludes the work.
II. DOSAND DDOS ATTAC K ON NSB
The role of 5G NSB is introduced as a novel business
model to enable the dynamic interoperability and resource
trading requirements of market players such as infrastructure
providers, consumers, and MNOs in trading the network and
computational resources [3]. NSB is acting as a mediator
between the MNO and the network tenants. Based on the
resource requests received from the tenants, NSB creates a
network slice template and broadcasts it to the prospective
MNOs. After receiving the offers (i.e., the price list for
available resources) from the MNOs, NSB selects the best
matching offer for the given request and facilitates to provide
the network slice to the tenants. According to the architecture
of NSB, mainly there are two contacting points (i.e., tenants
and MNOs) from where DoS attacks can be mounted on the
NSB. In the rest of the section, we discuss the most probable
four scenarios where DoS/DDoS attacks may occur on NSB.
A. Malicious resource requests sent by compromised IoT
tenants
Compromised IoT tenants can send extremely large number
of resource requests (which is also referred as slice request)
with malicious intention to NSB (i.e., DoS attack). This
leads to generation of subsequent events within the brokering
entity as per the sequential workflow of NSB. For instance,
a malicious request may consists of large number of resource
parameters that requires resource-intensive execution. In such
a scenario, the relevant NSB’s modules for each step will run
extensively to perform different activities including creation
of slice blueprints and disseminating them to the MNOs. The
high volume of transactions utilize the computational resources
and deplete the storage with malicious traffic. Thus, NSB
will be overloaded which will soon make the slicing service
unavailable. Furthermore, the effects of the attacks will be
reflected on the MNOs since the MNOs will continuously
respond to the requests received from NSB under attack. The
overall effect is that such malicious requests will overshadow
the legitimate resource requests in the NSB.
B. Malicious resource offers sent by compromised MNOs
NSB can be potentially affected by the malicious resource
offers sent by MNOs (i.e., DoS attack). The severity depends
on the computationally intensive nature of the selection algo-
rithm powering the NSB. Moreover, the malicious resource
offers sent by a compromised MNO may intentionally include
numerical values which results in overflow of the memory
heap of NSB thereby impacting it capabilities. Furthermore,
the malicious MNOs may intentionally send messages with
extensive length which overload the messaging protocols and
data buffers of the API services of the NSB. Thus, NSB may
fail to receive the legitimate resource offers under such attack.
C. Malicious resource requests sent by colluding IoT tenants
A DDoS attack can be launched by a malicious group of
IoT tenants which under an attacker’s control can operate
unlawfully towards a common ill objective. Every member
of the colluding group of IoT tenants send a permissible
number of requests to NSB. However, collectively they might
get success in bring down the services of NSB. Such an
attack, within limited time period, can result in overloading
of API related message streams, memory overflows and over-
utilization of computational resources. Early detection of such
colluding group of IoT tenant is relatively difficult when
compared with the malicious requests sent by a single tenant.
D. Malicious resource offers sent by colluding MNOs
A subset of MNOs under an external malicious control can
be made to collude and send bogus resource offers to NSB
(i.e., DDoS attack). This kind of attack can trap the slice
selection algorithm and hog the resources. Thus the group of
organized malicious MNOs does not allow NSB to attend the
legitimate resource offers and fullfil the service delivery.
III. PROP OS ED ARCHITECTURE TO MI TI GATE DOS
ATTACK O N NSB
We proposed a novel Security Service Blockchain (SSB)
for protecting the slice broker from DoS attacks launched by
malicious tenants and MNOs. The main objective of SSB is
to ensure the persistent operation of the NSB for genuine
members even under the presence of compromised tenants
and/or MNOs. In the proposed solution, we utilize SSB as the
smart contract based security gateway to validate each request
and control the access of IoT tenants as well as MNOs to
the slice broker. The proposed SSB ensures that all resource
requests and resource offers committed to the slice broker are
valid and approved by the consensus process of the dedicated
secure blockchain network. Figure 1 illustrated the deployment
of proposed SSB mechanism.
MNO
MNO
MNO
Unverified
Slice Offers
Mobile Network Operators (MNOs)
IoT Tenants
Smart Hospital
Smart Factory
Smart City/Home
Security Service Blockchain
(SSB)
Unverified
Slice Requests
Network Slice Broker
(NSB)
Verified Slice
Requests Verified
Slice Offers Approved
Slice Offers
1
2
3Request
Slice Offers
4
Process the
requests and
request slice offers
5
6
7
8
9
Analyze the offers
and select slice
the best offers
10
Verification of
Slice Requests
Verification of
Slice Offers
Fig. 1: Proposed Security Service Blockchain (SSB)
A. Assumptions
We make few assumptions while developing the proposed
SSB mechanism. These assumptions are made to match the
proposed system with real world deployments.
1) At any given time, the underlying infrastructure, comprising
computational and storage resources, where the NSB is
deployed is finite. Once the resources are fully utilized,
transactions will not be processed.
2) The capacity of communication channels, including mes-
sage buffers to communicate between IoT tenants, NSB,
and MNOs are limited. Once the message buffer capacity
has been exceeded, NSB will not receive neither resource
requests from tenants nor resource offers from MNOs.
3) The concurrent transaction processing capacity of the NSB
for IoT tenants and MNOs are limited. Once the processing
capacity has been overloaded, the transactions will not be
processed as anticipated. This type of scenario regarded as
a DoS effect.
4) The minor impact of latency for a legitimate request over
scaled up malicious requests denotes that the effect of a
malicious requests is minimal to the legitimate request.
B. Prerequisites
Each IoT tenant and MNO requires to register with slice
brokering ecosystem to acquire the transaction profile. The
transaction profile defines the scope of services eligible to the
individuals by NSB. Table II reflects an example transaction
profile of a IoT tenants and MNOs. The transaction profile
registration completes upon the consensus procedure including
storage of the distributed ledger.
C. Transaction profile based verification
The malicious resource requests launched from compro-
mised tenants as well as compromised MNOs need to be
distinguished from the legitimate requests. The tenants and
MNOs require to agree on the limits for the parameters as
defined in Table II prior to consume the slice brokering
service. These profiles will be stored in the immutable ledger
in blockchain upon the consensus process. We propose to
utilize the blockchain based transaction profiles to verify each
request launched by the tenant and MNO to the SSB. After the
transaction profile verification, if the requests are within the
conditions defined in profile, the SSB smart contract invokes
NSB as an off-chain request to submit legitimate request to
NSB. Algorithm 1 denotes the corresponding steps encoded
on the smart contract.
TABLE II: Transaction profile for network tenant and MNO
Parameter Value for ten-
ant
Value for
MNO
Messages per day 1000 100
Max message length 200 bytes 400 bytes
Type of message Resource
request
Resource offers
Maximum parameter count 100 200
Maximum parameter value 1000 1000
Algorithm 1
Require: M1={ID , request, currentT ime}
T P retrieveProfileFromLedger(ID)
if isV alidM essage(req uest, T P )then
if messagesT oday T P.messagesP er Day then
if messageLength T P .maxMessag eLength then
if parameterC ount T P.maxP arameter Count
then
if validateP arameter V alues(request)then
invokeN S B(request)
updateSS BLedgerLegitimateRequest(request)
end if
else
updateSS BLedger InvalidP ar amV alue(request)
end if
else
updateSS BLedger InvalidP ar amCount(request)
end if
else
updateSS BLedgerInvalidLength(request)
else
updateSS BLedgerInvalidM essageC ountrequest)
end if
end if
D. Advantages of SSB
Computational offloading: NSB is envisioned to be ex-
tremely busy with (i) the processing of large number of
resource requests from network tenants and resource offers
from MNOs, (ii) selecting best offer from the pool of resource
offers, (iii) monitoring SLA compliance, and (iv) communi-
cating with slice manager of each MNO. In this scenario,
handling DoS attacks with separate blockchain (SSB) offloads
the DoS prevention overhead from NSB and ensures persistent
service to the legitimate tenants over attacks.
Blockchain-based transaction profiling using smart con-
tracts: The transaction profiles are stored in the blockchain in
the immutable manner. Furthermore, the smart contract based
operations ensure that the malicious groups cannot tamper the
profile information stored in the blockchain with cryptographic
verifications.
Efficient data logging: Most of logging activity related
to resource requests and resource offers are of no use once
the slice has been released and payment settlement has been
done. Thus, such data logs need not to be maintained on NSB
otherwise it will quickly deplete the storage capacity. Thus,
storing such data in separate blockchain SSB allows to deal
efficiently with such data of local and temporal importance.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS
In this section, we explain the experimental setup and elab-
orate the experiments performed to to investigate the behavior
of proposed architecture in a near realistic environment.
A. Infrastructure placement of the implementation setup
As illustrated in Figure 2, the Fog tenants simulated by the
Raspberry Pi. The MNOs are simulated by Virtual Machines
(VM). The malicious tenants and MNOs also simulated by the
selected fog nodes and VMs. A cloud instance with Ubuntu
19.04 operating system used to deploy the SSB with public
IP access. The processor is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 2.33GHz
with 16GB RAM. A router with 5G and LAN connects the
components to internet. Lenovo Thinkpad T14 laptop used as
the host machine for NSB, which is a blockchain-based slice
broker deployment. The NSB deployed on a Ubuntu 18.04
VM. We used two instances of Hyperledger Fabric blockchain
platform with 5 nodes and RAFT consensus based mining
service deployed for each SSB and NSB. Communication
between each component facilitated using MQ Telemetry
Transport (MQTT) broker deployed on cloud server.
B. DoS attacks and legitimate requests simulation for latency
evaluation experiments
In the different experiments, the scaled up malicious re-
source requests and MNO offers simulated using multithreaded
Fog nodes
(IoT Tenants infrastructure)
Lenovo Thinkpad
T480S
Wi-Fi
LAN
MNOs as VMs
MNO VM 1
MNO VM 2
MNO VM 3
MNO VM 4
Slice 1
Slice 2
Slices as docker
containers
1
3
5
Shareable MNO
Infrastructure
Internet
Accessing slices
Raspberry Pi 4 Model A
TCL router
Hyperledger Blockchain
2Threat profile based verification
Smart Contract
7
Security Service Blockchain (SSB)
Hyperledger Blockchain
4
Slice Selection Function
Blockchain-based
Network Slice Broker (NSB)
9
6
8
10
Proposed Solution
MQTT
MQTT
MQTT
MQTT
Malicious
Users
Malicious
Requests
Malicious
Requests
Blockchain
Nodes
Fig. 2: The implementation setup
1 5 10 25 50
Number of concurrent transactions in a trial
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
Average latency in miliseconds
104
With blockchain-based tenant profile verification
Without blockchain-based profile verification
With blockchain-based MNO profile verification
With blockchain-based tenant and MNO profile verification
Fig. 3: Slice creation latency with and without SSB tenant
profile verification for legitimate resource requests
software codes run on Raspberry Pi and VMs. Different mes-
sages(slice requests/resource offers) with a specific number of
concurrent transactions launched by the program on each trial.
Each trial performed 100 times and measured the mean end to
end latency to complete entire set of transactions in the trial.
Furthermore, the mean and standard deviation for each test
presented graphically as the results.
C. Experimental configuration on blockchain network
The BatchT imeO ut parmeter of Hyperledger Fabric,
which is the duration to wait before processing a batch
of transactions by the mining nodes configured as 500ms,
1000ms, and 2000ms on different experiments for SSB. The
BatchT imeO ut configured fixed on NSB for all experiments.
D. Performance impact incurred by the SSB integration for
the scaled up legitimate resource requests
The objective of this experiment is to evaluate the latency
impact incurred on resource requests by each verification on
SSB and compare with the latency of SSB-less NSB. In the
proposed architecture, SSB first receives resource request by
tenants or resource offers by MNOs before sending to NSB.
Each message is verified with the profile information in the
smart contract of SSB. The smart contract ensures whether the
message is within the limits defined in the profile and approves
the transaction. Once the approved transaction committed to
the ledger, it will included to the block and disseminated. This
procedure incorporates additional latency of block generation
to the existing slice brokering process. We evaluated the im-
pact of latency incurred by the integration of SSB to the NSB.
Figure 3 presents the latency impact of SSB integration for a
legitimate transactions when SSB and NSB block generation
time set to 1000ms. The number of concurrent transactions
have been increased upto 50 transactions per batch in order to
evaluate the system performance over scaling up requests.
1) Tenant profile verification latency:In this evaluation,
resource requests sent to the SSB simulating legitimate tenant
requests. Upon tenant profile verification and approval by the
SSB, the request forwarded to the NSB. No MNO verification
performed. Obviously, the block generation time affected as an
additional latency with the integration of SSB when comparing
with SSB not integrated transaction latency.
2) MNO profile verification latency:In this evaluation,
resource offers sent to the SSB to simulate legitimate MNO
resource offers. Upon MNO profile verification and approval
by the SSB, the request forwarded to the NSB for selection of
resource offer. No tenant verification performed. The effect of
additional block mining for the transaction verification in SSB
is reflected from the results. However, the MNO verification
latency is slightly higher than the tenant profile verification
since each resource request consists of multiple MNO offers
and verification of all MNOs takes time.
3) Tenant and MNO profile verification latency:In this
evaluation, resource requests sent to the SSB simulating le-
gitimate tenants. The tenant verification performed for the
resource request and MNO profile verification performed for
resource offers which incur more latency.
However, the additional latency is required to be accepted
when additional layer of security has been integrated. This
latency is dependent on the block generation time which
is currently configured as 1000ms. The block time can be
reduced upto 200ms as well as increased. Hence, the latency
is configurable according to the transaction traffic. Further-
more, when the throughput is getting increased, the standard
deviation is slightly increased as per the Figure 3. The key
reason we observed was the dissemination of requests within
multiple blocks. The block generation time is 1000ms in the
implementation setup and when the entire batch of transactions
not included into the same block, the latency is increased since
all transactions in multiple blocks required to be completed.
However, in the next experiments, obviously SSB is beneficial
to defend NSB on higher number of malicious requests.
E. Behavior of slice creation latency with malicious traffic
The objective of this experiment is to evaluate the latency
impact of legitimate resource requests while SSB is defend-
ing the malicious requests launched. It is assumed that the
compromised tenants launch the DoS attack as slice requests
and compromised MNOs launch the DoS attacks as malicious
resource offers. When the SSB is integrated to the NSB,
all messages are verified by the SSB along with the profile
information. The NSB receive approved resource requests and
MNO offers as off-chain invocation committed by the SSB.
The NSB receives slice request or MNO offers as an off-chain
invocation of smart contract if and only if the SSB request is
within the security verification criteria. We assume that the
uninterrupted service delivery with minimal impact on latency
for the legitimate resource requests over malicious requests
which simulate DoS attack attempt reflects that the proposed
system is capable to defend NSB from DoS attacks.
In this experiment, we compared the latency of a single
legitimate transaction over NSB in an attack scenario in SSB
integrated and non-integrated cases. First, we evaluated the
end to end latency of a legitimate transaction over different
number of malicious resource requests and resource offers.
The malicious resource requests leading to a DoS attack
simulated using multi-threaded program running on Raspberry
Pi. We assume the lower impact to the latency of a legitimate
transaction over malicious requests reflect that there is no inter-
ference to the legitimate request by the malicious transactions.
1) Transaction latency comparison with and without SSB
integration on malicious resource requests :Figure 4 re-
flects the interference to the legitimate slice requests with
and without SSB integration on different BatchT imeOut
configurations on SSB. The experiment performed in 500ms,
1000ms, and 2000ms block BatchT imeO ut configurations of
SSB. The impact to the legitimate request over the malicious
resource requests have been considered in when the SSB is not
integrated. Apparently, the end to end latency is increasing
when the number of malicious resource requests increased.
This latency increase indicates the service failures over the
flooded requests. When the NSB is being flooded with the
requests, the mining nodes are overloaded and functionality of
NSB is hindered. In contrast, the SSB integrated experiment
proves that the latency does not being significantly affected
by the flooded resource requests. We observed that when 50
malicious transactions are launched, the mean latency of the
legitimate transaction is 115 seconds on SSB-less NSB. In
contrast, the mean latency is 5 seconds when the SSB has been
integrated to the NSB. When SSB is integrated, the NSB does
not reach the malicious traffic and preserves NSB resources
for legitimate requests.
1 5 10 25 50
Number of malicious resource requests per legitimate request
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Average latency in miliseconds
104
Without blockchain-based tenant profile verification
With blockchain-based tenant profile verification (BlockTime=1s)
With blockchain-based tenant profile verification (BlockTime=2s)
With blockchain-based tenant profile verification (BlockTime=0.5s)
Fig. 4: Latency of single legitimate transaction with and
without SSB over malicious resource requests
2) Transaction latency comparison with and without SSB
integration on malicious resource offers:Figure 5 reflects the
interference to the legitimate resource offers with and without
SSB integration on different BatchT imeOut configurations
on SSB. The experiment performed in 500ms, 1000ms, and
2000ms block BatchT imeO ut configurations of SSB. The
malicious resource offers leading to a DoS attack simulated us-
ing the multithreaded program running on VM. The end to end
latency increase when the number of resource offers increased
in the system without SSB. This latency increase indicates
the service failures over the flooded malicious resource offers.
When the NSB is being flooded with the malicious offers,
the mining nodes are overloaded and the functionality of NSB
is hindered. In contrast, the SSB integrated experiment proves
that the latency does not being affected by the flooded resource
offers when integrated with SSB. The experiment performed in
500ms, 1000ms, and 2000ms BatchT imeO ut configurations
of SSB. We observed that when 50 malicious transactions are
launched, the mean latency of the legitimate transaction is 119
seconds on SSB-less NSB. In contrast, the mean latency is 5
seconds when the SSB has been integrated to the NSB. When
SSB is integrated, the NSB does not reach the malicious traffic
and preserves NSB resources for legitimate requests.
3) Transaction latency comparison with and without
SSB integration on malicious slice request with malicious
resource offers:Figure 6 reflects the interference to the
legitimate resource offers with and without SSB integra-
tion on different BatchT imeOut configurations on SSB.
The experiment performed in 500ms, 1000ms, and 2000ms
BatchT imeO ut configurations of SSB. The malicious re-
source requests and offers leading to a DoS attack simulated
using the multithreaded program running on Raspberry Pi
and VM. The end to end latency increase when the total
number of resource requests and resource offers increased.
This latency increase indicates the service failures over the
flooded malicious traffic. When the NSB is being flooded with
the malicious resource requests and offers, the mining nodes
are overloaded and the functionality of NSB is hindered. In
contrast, the SSB integrated experiment proves that the latency
does not being affected by the flooded resource requests and
Fig. 5: Latency of single legitimate transaction with and
without SSB over malicious offers
1 5 10 25 50
Total number of malicious messages (tenant requests + tenant offers) per legitimate resource requests
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Average slice creation latency in miliseconds
104
Without blockchain-based Tenant-MNO profile verification
With blockchain-based Tenant-MNO profile verification(BlockTime=1s)
With blockchain-based Tenant-MNO profile verification(BlockTime=0.5s)
With blockchain-based Tenant-MNO profile verification(BlockTime=2s)
Fig. 6: Latency of single legitimate transaction with and
without SSB over malicious resource requests+resource offers
offers when integrated with SSB. We observed that when
50 malicious transactions are launched, the mean latency of
the legitimate transaction is 35 seconds on SSB-less NSB.
In contrast, the mean latency is 6.9 seconds when the SSB
has been integrated to the NSB. When SSB is integrated, the
NSB does not reach the malicious traffic and preserves NSB
resources for legitimate requests.
When the SSB smart contract as illustrated on Algorithm
1 has been focused, the transaction profile verification smart
contract performs a querying operation initially. The ledger
updates on failure conditions are optional and no significant
affect the sequential flow of a transaction. The transaction
approval invokes mining nodes for the verified transactions
only. Hence, in the malicious attempts, the utilization of SSB
is limited to the querying and verification operation. The
NSB utilized if and only if either the resource request or
resource offer is within the specific transaction profile limits.
Therefore, no overhead incurred on the NSB by flooding
type requests. The end to end latency of legitimate requests
not being significantly affected with the proposed method.
However, significant latency advantage is obvious when NSB
is running without SSB on lower malicious message rates
such as 1, 5, and 10. This is a common observation on
Figure 4, Figure 5, and Figure 6. The key reason is the
additional block mining latency incurred by SSB. However,
in higher malicious message rates such as 25 and 50, SSB
outperforms NSB standalone deployment in terms of latency.
Obviously, SSB integration is safe and advantageous in terms
of DoS prevention in the scalable environments. However, the
evaluation was limited upto 50 malicious requests per batch
due to infrastructure limitations. We observed that the RAFT
consensus nodes of Hyperledger take more than 45 seconds to
process the transaction. The transactions which have been not
approved within 45 seconds will not be added to the blocks.
V. CH AL LE NG ES A ND LIMITATIONS
A. Challenges
1) Identification of valid requests launched by malicious
groups to attack SSB: The SSB performs an individual vali-
dation on the resource requests and offers to evaluate whether
each request is within the limits. However, it is possible to
an organized group of registered tenants can explicitly send
individual requests to attack the NSB. In such case, SSB
verification will be passed since the request is within the
profile verification criteria. The resultant will affect the NSB.
2) Latency incurred by the SSB block verification: When
the Figure 3 has been focused, the impact of additional latency
incurred by the verification steps is obvious. However, this
latency depends on the block mining interval defined on the
SSB and can be adjusted by configuration.
3) Additional overhead to operate blockchain network:
SSB is a dedicated blockchain network which has been
employed in parallel to the NSB. Hence, the NSB includes
the ordinary operational overheads applicable to a generic
blockchain network, including computational overheads.
B. Limitations
1) Authentication of messages exchanged in different chan-
nels are not present: In the proposed architecture, authenti-
cation of messages exchanged are not present. The messages
exchanged can be forged even after the verification by SSB.
2) Privacy over the SSB records and messages are not en-
forced: The transaction records as well as profile information
have not been enforced with privacy preservation technique.
3) Access control to the network services along with service
level agreements are not specifically focused: Although we
address, specifically, the mitigation of DoS attacks with the so
called SSB NSB, there are different other security aspects that
can be considered in blockchain-based NSBs. For instance,
there are possibilities to use dynamic profiling smart contracts
and consensus algorithms with blockchain-based NSBs for
managing security-oriented service level agreements (SSLAs)
for local network operators and infrastructure providers run-
ning on a common platform. Through the dynamic profile
status, the stakeholders are authorized to access the functions
of NSB. Moreover, it can be upgraded with lightweight
security solutions in terms of Authentication, Authorization
and Accounting (AAA).
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we identified the potential DoS/DDoS attacks
which can be mounted on NSB by malicious tenants and ma-
licious MNOs. We discussed the impact of the DoS/DDoS at-
tacks on NSB and highlighted the significance of handling and
defending NSB for persistent service delivery. We proposed
a threat profiling based security mechanism developed using
blockchain and smart contracts. The experimental evaluation
reflects that the proposed solution ensures smooth NSB service
delivery to the legitimate tenants even under malicious traffic.
In future, we plan to utilize the blockchain recorded data as a
training dataset to detect more complicated DoS/DDoS attack
scenarios.
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