Enhancing Trust and Resource Allocation in Telecommunications Cloud

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has brought the telecommunications industry multiple benefits; however, it has also introduced many new security issues. This thesis tackles security issues related to NFV trust and defines trust as confidence in the integrity of the software and hardware in a system. Existing NFV trust solutions have added trust to the NFV infrastructure with boot time measurements, placement of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) on trusted infrastructure and integrity checks of a small set of VNF operations. This thesis implements the introduced trust elements from existing solutions and proposes several extensions. These extensions enable trust in the NFV management software with run time measurements, introduces a new method for building VNF trust, extends the number of trusted VNF operations and increases the user auditability of trust decisions. The proposed extensions are designed, implemented and evaluated in a trusted NFV cloud environment. Although the proposed extensions create a more trusted cloud, they come at a steep performance cost to VNF operations. However, the most impacted VNF operations only affect the cloud provider and not the telecommunications consumer. This thesis offers a valuable contribution to NFV clouds where increased trust is more important than maximized performance or where VNF operations are rarely performed