Hierarchical Security Architecture for Next Generation Mobile Networks

The integration of existing and emerging technologies in Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) exposes the interworked infrastructure to malicious security threats arising from individual networks and heightens the possibility of their migration across network boundaries. Owing to their autonomous characteristics, the proprietary security solutions of legacy networks cannot be extended to address such multi-faceted security threats affecting NGMN functionality. In this paper, we propose a generic hierarchical security architecture that identifies and eliminates/isolates the dominant security threats in NGMN. While the architecture utilizes an anomaly-based security detection mechanism, elimination/isolation is carried out through a cooperative approach between the node under attack and its corresponding higher tier nodes. Performance evaluation indicates that the architecture is capable of isolating threats such as denial-of-service (DoS) and worm attacks in a timely manner.