Modern enterprise networks heavily rely on ubiquitous network middleboxes for advanced traffic processing such as deep packet inspection, traffic classification, and load balancing. Recent advances in NFV have pushed forward the paradigm of migrating in-house middleboxes to third-party providers as software-based services for reduced cost yet increased scalability. Despite its potential, this new service model also raises new security and privacy concerns, as traffic is now redirected and processed in an untrusted environment. In this article, we survey recent efforts in the direction of enabling secure outsourced middlebox functions, and identify open challenges for researchers and practitioners to further investigate solutions toward secure middlebox services.

中文翻译：

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迈向安全的外包中间盒服务：实践，挑战和超越

现代企业网络严重依赖于无处不在的网络中间盒来进行高级流量处理，例如深度数据包检查，流量分类和负载平衡。NFV的最新进展推动了将内部中间盒作为基于软件的服务迁移到第三方提供商的范例，从而降低了成本并提高了可扩展性。尽管具有潜力，但是这种新的服务模型还引发了新的安全性和隐私问题，因为流量现在已在不受信任的环境中重定向和处理。在本文中，我们调查了在实现安全外包中间盒功能方面的最新努力，并确定了研究人员和从业人员面临的开放挑战，以进一步研究针对安全中间盒服务的解决方案。