Your Cybersecurity Is Now Programmable: Experiments on Networking and Blockchain Systems

Abstract

We increasingly live in a software-defined world where systems that were once implemented as rigid control capabilities or fixed function hardware systems are now highly programmable through software interfaces that decouple underlying details and offer remote control and centralized management. Blockchain and cloud computing systems are early examples of embracing software-defined system designs. We argue that we should further leverage software-defined principles to make security programmable, thus also make this software-defined world more secure. We will use two case studies to demonstrate how programmable security can be achieved on software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain systems, respectively.