Classification of network slicing threats based on slicing enablers: A survey

Abstract

One of the Main expectation of the 5G environment is supporting various services in many areas such as healthcare, education, energy, streaming, V2X (vehicle to everything) communication, etc. To implement such an expectation, there is a need to assign dedicated resources and functionalities for each service by slicing the network which means creating a virtual network for each service inside a physical network. Each virtual network (Slice) should be isolated from the other virtual network (Slice), and the security of that slice becomes a core issue in most research and studies. In this study, after focusing on security challenges in network slices, we describe the network slicing idea, the isolation concept, and the enablers of the network slicing, as well as the prevention of related attacks, risks, and concerns in each enabler. The research also lists the previous surveys and maps out taxonomies to illustrate the contribution of each survey in presenting threats and attacks against network slicing.

Keywords

• Network slicing
• Network slicing enablers
• Security
• Threats
• SDN
• NFV