## 2 Related Work  
In recent years, NFV based solutions have become a very active research area, due to the benefits promised by cost-effective solutions when virtualising network equipment. Within the research area of NFV, SFC forwarding protocols and their corresponding control plane mechanisms are NFV research areas that have gained attention [10; 11; 12]. Nevertheless, the security research on these networking standards is limited, where none of the SFC standards are protecting the privacy and the integrity the data plane traffic [13]. This is a complex problem that consists of data protection problems on multiple levels; the orchestration plane, the control plane and the data plane. Hence, our work aims to cover this research gap, by providing a new packet forwarding standard that is reflected on all these planes. From a data plane perspective, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) workgroup NVO3 [14] have considered multiple overlay protocol for use in data centres. Generic UDP Encapsulation [15], Geneve [14], VXLAN-GPE [16], and NSH [17] are all protocol competing to be the next standard. They all have limitations related to multi-vendor and multi-domain interoperability and they also have a lack of security extensions. MPLS-SR [18] does support multi-domain topologies, but, in an SFC context, they all rely on the underlying protocol, such as IPSec tunnels, to provide encryption. However, such a tunnel can be perceived as a wire between data centres. Multiples of these tunnels constitute a virtual overlay network that is unprotected from all data threats that reside within the network. Then, there is no protection of the integrity of the headers of the data-flow across multiple domains. In IPv6, Segment Routing (SR) [8] is supported; however, during encryption, the header is replaced and the segments become invisible for intermediate routers. We aim to solve this by introducing a new overlay packet header that supports encryption inside the overlying network protocols, such as NSH. With respect to interconnected control planes, we have earlier showed [6] that there are two orchestration methods across multiple service provider domains. (1) A top-down approach by utilising a hierarchy of orchestration planes [19] or control planes [20] or (2) by using an east-west control plane approach such as SDNi [21] or BGP [22]. Both interconnection methods try to overcome the problem of multiple forwarding standards and multiple types of network controllers. The industry has responded by providing tenant-based data centres, where each tenant extends their data centre across multiple sites and omits the need for control plane interconnections. Networking by NSX-T [23] from VMWare is one example of such multi-tenant data centre technologies where a micro-segmented infrastructure can span over multiple sites. However, most of the underlying network protocols, such as Geneve [14] in NSX-T, are not capable of combining SR with micro-segmentation and flow-based encryption. Hence, we have in our previous work [3] suggested a new SFC header, based on an NSH extension that adds more granularity to the security aspect of an SFC. Correspondingly, we have in  
Figure 1: Research method. this paper developed a RESTconf based control plane for distributing the forwarding decisions of this new packet header. Introducing a new packet header has historically been problematic with respect to the adoption into existing hardware. When a new network protocol was suggested, the network operators had to wait for a set of standardisation documents from organisations such as IETF and ONF [24]. Furthermore, they also had to wait for the switch vendors to develop a new software version. Sometimes, a new network standard also required new hardware. The Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) [25] language aims to solve this issue by defining a framework that directly programs packet parsing and packet forwarding instructions to a switch in runtime.