The recent years have witnessed a growth in the number of users connected to computer networks, due mainly to megatrends such\nas Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, and Smart Grids. Simultaneously, service providers started offering vertical services\nrelated to a specific business case (e.g., automotive, banking, and e-health) requiring more and more scalability and flexibility for\nthe infrastructures and their management. NFV and SDN technologies are a clear way forward to address these challenges even\nthough they are still in their early stages. Security plays a central role in this scenario, mainly because it must follow the rapid\nevolution of computer networks and the growing number of devices. The main issue is to protect the end-user from the increasing\nthreats, and for this reason, we propose in this paper a security framework compliant to the Security-as-a-Service paradigm. In\norder to implement this framework, we leverage NFV and SDN technologies, using a user-centered approach. This allows to\ncustomize the security service starting from user preferences. Another goal of our work is to highlight the main relevant challenges\nencountered in the design and implementation of our solution. In particular, we demonstrate how significant is to choose an\nefficient way to configure the Virtual Network Security Functions in terms of performance. Furthermore, we also address the\nnontrivial problem of Service Function Chaining in an NFV MANO platform and we show what are the main challenges with\nrespect to this problem.
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