Co-hosted at 8th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft2022), the 4th International Workshop on Cyber-Security in Software-defined and Virtualized Infrastructures (SecSoft) was held from June 27 to July 1, 2022 in Milan, Italy.

IEEE NetSoft is a flagship conference aiming at addressing “Softwarization” of networks and systemic trends concerning the convergence of Cloud Computing, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

The main purpose of the SecSoft workshop is to integrate the “Security, Safety, Trust and Privacy support in virtualized environments” conference topic. Beyond security mechanisms at the hypervisor or domain level, the softwarization of legacy security appliances, and federation schemes between multiple domains, this Workshop look ahead to more dynamic, agile, and autonomic forms of detection and reaction of advanced threats, including the persistence ones. The specific focus was on secure and trustworthy digital services, including pure virtual services as well as cyber-physical systems. The objective was to stimulate a constructive discussion on overall frameworks and specific aspects that are necessary to build wide situational awareness and to timely counter cyber-attacks: pervasive monitoring and deep inspection, cross-correlation in time and space dimensions and detection, automated control and management of complex orchestratable systems, forensics and legal investigation, trustworthiness and privacy.

The SecSoft workshop is a joint initiative from EU Cyber-Security projects: GUARD, SIMARGL, RAINBOW, PALANTIR, INSPIRE-5Gplus, SIFIS-Home, ELECTRON and SDN-microSENSE. It is based on the proven formula of mixing research papers, keynote speeches, and presentations of EU projects, being an invaluable opportunity to share thoughts, ideas, results among research communities.

GUARD at SecSoft 2022

Matteo Repetto, GUARD Technical Coordinator provided a final overview of the Project, introducing the main concepts and achievements after 3 years of research and development activities. The GUARD framework is pioneering the usage of standard interfaces to security functions to discover the topology of multi-domain digital service chains and automate the deployment and operation of detection and analytics tasks. The presentation also showed clips of the GUARD demo on detection and mitigation of Denial-of-Service attacks, a joint collaboration of CNR, CNIT, NASK and 8BELLS.

Full presentation and demos available in GUARD Youtube channel and GUARD video section.