Research Of Security Metric Architecture For Next Generation Network

During the rapid development of Next Generation Network (NGN), security risk assessment has become one of the major concerns in recent studies. Security metric architecture is the foundation of security assessment. Based on the goal and the content of security assessment, security metric architecture is a criterion of measurement, which can be used to measure the organization's security maturity level. Therefore, constructing security metric architecture of NGN is very important for the security assessment of NGN.The thesis first presents the security architecture of NGN by combining the architecture of security framework by ITU-T X.805 and the network levels of NGN.Based on the architecture, a sketch map of picking-up metrics is given, and the security metric architecture for NGN is built. Then four comprehensive metrics, which are vulnerability, threat, stability and survivability, are first presented. Based on these four metrics, a hierarchical security metric architecture is devised, and instanced in a prototype metric collection system of NGN.The proposed metric architecture has several contributions. First, the metrics are accurate and dynamic. The number of metrics is small (about 20) to be manageable and measurable, which means that they are easy to collect from practical systems. Second, the set of metrics covers most of the important measurable security attributes of NGN. Third, a prototype system based on the security metrics is built and the experimentation result illuminates the availability of the presented metrics. Since there is limited research result of the security metric architecture for NGN at present, this metric architecture can be referenced to a certain extent.