Biblio

A Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack is usually instigated on a primary server that provides important services in a network. However such DDoS attacks can be identified and mitigated by the controller in a Software Defined Network (SDN). If the intruder further performs an attack on the controller along with the server, the attack becomes successful.In this paper, we show how such a combined DDoS attack can be instigated on a controller as well as a primary server. The DDoS attack on the primary server is instigated by compromising few hosts to send packets with spoofed IP addresses and the attack on the controller is instigated by compromising few switches to send flow table requests repeatedly to the controller. With the help of an emulator called mininet, we show the severity of this attack on the performance of the network. We further propose a common technique that can be used to mitigate this kind of attack by observing the variation of destination IP addresses and setting different priorities to switches and handling the flow table requests accordingly by the controller.

Software-Defined Network's (SDN) core working depends on the centralized controller which implements the control plane. With the help of this controller, security threats like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be identified easily. A DDoS attack is usually instigated on servers by sending a huge amount of unwanted traffic that exhausts its resources, denying their services to genuine users. Earlier research work has been carried out to mitigate DDoS attacks at the switch and the host level. Mitigation at switch level involves identifying the switch which sends a lot of unwanted traffic in the network and blocking it from the network. But this solution is not feasible as it will also block genuine hosts connected to that switch. Later mitigation at the host level was introduced wherein the compromised hosts were identified and blocked thereby allowing genuine hosts to send their traffic in the network. Though this solution is feasible, it will block the traffic from the genuine applications of the compromised host as well. In this paper, we propose a new way to identify and mitigate the DDoS attack at the application level so that only the application generating the DDoS traffic is blocked and other genuine applications are allowed to send traffic in the network normally.