Securing the next generation mobile network

Abstract

Despite well-defined security models to prevent fraudulent intrusion, a number of security attacks have been reported in literature for legacy networks. While a section of these attacks are due to inherent design limitations, others stem from the pervasive introduction of Internet Protocol (IP)-based applications and external attacks. The former can be addressed by the continual evolution of the system (as is the case with existing systems) whereas the latter requires careful designing. With the advent of all-IP next generation mobile network (NGMN) inter-connecting disparate access technologies, the design process assumes paramount importance in relation to detecting/preventing/eliminating migration of attacks through infected terminals. Taking into consideration the fact that standardization bodies are responsible for individual network evolution, a cooperative NGMN security architecture is proposed in this paper that identifies and isolates/eliminates security attacks. The cooperation is encased by the network elements within the NGMN hierarchy and utilizes an anomaly-based attack detection mechanism. Several dominant security attacks are simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.

A generic sampling framework for improving anomaly detection in the next generation network

“…Unfortunately, in addition to its complex interworking architecture, the propagation of enormous number of traffic flows on the NGN high speed links have introduced additional challenges for its successful deployment. Besides the quality of service (QoS) [4] and security [5] issues, another key subject that needs to be addressed is the capability of network monitoring devices, in particular the network routers to serve the disparity of traffic flows in the NGN. With such a challenging environment, recording statistics of every packet (or traffic flows) require excessive processing capacity and cache memory, thereby imposing scalability issue and complicating traffic monitoring task in the network.…”

“…From the previous discussion, it is clear that the nature of the observed traffic, i.e., either malicious or DoS/DDoS, can be determined by using Equations (3) and (5). In order to define the threshold values for these two identification steps, we may use a predefined threshold value for each parameters.…”

IT Education Topics for Future Networking

“…The security architecture standard outlined in 1989 in the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model of layered networks (ISO 7498-2, 1989) does not take specific security requirements of mobile networking in consideration and for this reason there is a clear need to update this standard. Recent security architecture proposals are published in (Eschenbrücher et al, 2004;Ghalwash et al, 2007;Hashim et al, 2007;Zheng et al, 2005b).…”

“…On the Application Security Layer are implemented security services like virus protection, system access control, certificates, application layer gateway, deep inspection firewall, Secure Shell (SSH), and Simple Network Management Protocol version 3 (SNMPv3) as countermeasures to security threats like virus infections, false data, malicious programs, unauthorized users, and file corruption. In (Hashim et al, 2007) is described a security architecture for a mobile infrastructure network with mobile end user devices for protection against two severe security threats in mobile networking, Denial-of-Service and worm. Such a mobile infrastructure network, called Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) , has a network topology similar to the hierarchical topology of present 3G wireless cellular networks.…”

Editorial

“…Hashim et al . [3] propose a cooperative next generation mobile network (NGMN) security architecture. In this paper, the authors made their effort to identify and isolate/eliminate security attacks, taking into account the fact that standardization bodies are responsible only for individual network evolution.…”