Toward Secure Outsourced Middlebox Services: Practices, Challenges, and Beyond

Modern enterprise networks heavily rely on ubiquitous network middleboxes for advanced traffic processing such as deep packet inspection, traffic classification, and load balancing. Recent advances in NFV have pushed forward the paradigm of migrating in-house middleboxes to third-party providers as software-based services for reduced cost yet increased scalability. Despite its potential, this new service model also raises new security and privacy concerns, as traffic is now redirected and processed in an untrusted environment. In this article, we survey recent efforts in the direction of enabling secure outsourced middlebox functions, and identify open challenges for researchers and practitioners to further investigate solutions toward secure middlebox services.