The past few years have witnessed revolutionary advances in network technology. Along with
new techniques such as SDN come lots of new
network security challenges. Conventional network security mechanisms are incompetent to
overcome these challenges, since they are built
on a static network configuration that facilitates
attackers in finding the weaknesses of a network.
In this article, we conceive a novel conceptual
network security mechanism, the evolving
defense mechanism (EDM), to resolve current
and future security problems. EDM is based on
a bio-inspired idea of network configuration
variations. According to the security requirements of the system, the user, and the network
security state, EDM selects an efficient network
configuration variation strategy to prevent corresponding security threats. Combined with SDN
implementation, EDM resolves security problems from a new angle and is capable of evolving
with new network security technology. We sketch
a way to implement EDM and present its reference framework, which serves as an ecosystem
and coexisting environment for various kinds of
network configuration variations. The proposed
mechanism avoids the deficiency of conventional
mechanisms and has potential to cope with
emerging security threats.