Intent-based Network Slice Reconfiguration for Elastic Battlefield Communication

A critical requirement in the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Unified Network Plan is that future force networks must "automate cybersecurity capabilities" to detect and react to threats or attacks. Therefore, intelligent automated agents must be designed to act decisively and effectively when threats or attacks are detected in the protected network. Software defined networking (SDN) provides many capabilities to solve several of the issues presented by these requirements with techniques such as network slicing and virtual network functions (VNF). The granular control that network slicing provides over resources and network topology design will enable future-force networks to be elastic and react to changes in the operational environment. In this paper we introduce a methodology to dynamically reconfigure tactical network slice topologies using intent based programming by reacting to alerts from an intrusion detection system (IDS) implemented as a VNF in order to mitigate cyber attacks that have compromised a portion or slice of a protected tactical network. This elastic slice methodology applies scalable Edge-VNF intrusion detection at the tactical edge where bandwidth and computational resources are scarce, while simultaneously deploying Core-VNF intrusion detection inside the network nucleus where resources are more abundant. Our experimentation shows successful mitigation of 1st and 2nd order effects on network infrastructure and illustrates how dynamic network slicing can mitigate not only the initial cyber attack, but also the potential collateral damage in an efficient manner.