Biblio

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technique is presented in this paper to manage the Naval Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network for equipping the network with the function of reconfiguration and scalability. The programmable nature of SDN enables a programmable Modular Topology Generator (MTG), which provides an extensive control over the network’s internal connectivity and traffic control. Specifically, two functions of MTG are developed and examined in this paper, namely linkHosts and linkSwitches. These functions are able to place the network into three different states, i.e., fully connected, fully disconnected, and partially connected. Therefore, it provides extensive security benefits and allows network administrators to dynamically reconfigure the network and adjust settings according to the network’s needs. Extensive tests on Mininet have demonstrated the effectiveness of SDN for enabling the reconfigurable and scalable Naval SCADA network. Therefore, it provides a potent tool to enhance the resiliency/survivability, scalability/compatibility, and security of naval SCADA networks.

Internet always remains the target for the cyberattacks, and attackers are getting equipped with more potent tools due to the advancement of technology to preach the security of the Internet. Industries and organizations are sponsoring many projects to avoid these kinds of problems. As a result, SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture is becoming an acceptable alternative for the traditional IP based networks which seems a better approach to defend the Internet. However, SDN is also vulnerable to many new threats because of its architectural concept. SDN might be a primary target for DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks due to centralized control and linking of data plane and control plane. In this paper, the we propose a novel technique for detection of DDoS attacks using information theory metric. We compared our approach with widely used Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) based on Shannon entropy and Renyi entropy, and proved that our proposed methodology has more power to detect malicious flows in SDN based networks. We have used precision, detection rate and FPR (False Positive Rate) as performance parameters for comparison, and validated the methodology using a topology implemented in Mininet network emulator.

SDN marks a paradigm shift towards an externalized and logically centralized controller, unlike the legacy networks where control and data planes are tightly coupled. The controller has a comprehensive view of the network, offering flexibility to enforce new traffic engineering policies and easing automation. In SDN, a high performance controller is required for efficient traffic management. In this paper, we conduct a performance evaluation of two distributed SDN controllers, namely ONOS and OpenDayLight. Specifically, we use the Mininet emulation environment to emulate different topologies and the D-ITG traffic generator to evaluate aforementioned controllers based on metrics such as delay, jitter and packet loss. The experimental results show that ONOS provides a significantly higher latency, jitter and low packet loss than OpenDayLight in all topologies. We attribute the poor performance of OpenDayLight to its excessive CPU utilization and propose the use of Hyper-threading to improve its performance. This work provides practitioners in the telecoms industry with guidelines towards making informed controller selection decisions

In this article we have developed a simulation model in the Mininet environment for analyzing the operation of a software-defined network (SDN) in cloud data centers. The results of the simulation model of the operation of the SDN network on the Mininet emulator and the results of the simulation of the traditional network in the Graphical Network Simulator 3 emulator are presented.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising network architecture that aims at providing high flexibility through the separation between network logic (control plane) and forwarding functions (data plane). This separation provides logical centralization of controllers, global network overview, ease of programmability, and a range of new SDN-compliant services. In recent years, the adoption of SDN in enterprise networks has been constantly increasing. In the meantime, new challenges arise in different levels such as scalability, management, and security. In this paper, we elaborate on complex security issues in the current SDN architecture. Especially, reconnaissance attack where attackers generate traffic for the goal of exploring existing services, assets, and overall network topology. To eliminate reconnaissance attack in SDN environment, we propose SDN-based solution by utilizing distributed firewall application, security policy, and OpenFlow counters. Distributed firewall application is capable of tracking the flow based on pre-defined states that would monitor the connection to sensitive nodes toward malicious activity. We utilize Mininet to simulate the testing environment. We are able to detect and mitigate this type of attack at early stage and in average around 7 second.

Software defined Network is a network defined by software, which is one of the important feature which makes the legacy old networks to be flexible for dynamic configuration and so can cater to today's dynamic application requirement. It is a programmable network but it is prone to different type of attacks due to its centralized architecture. The author provided a solution to detect and prevent Distributed Denial of service attack in the paper. Mininet [5] which is a popular emulator for Software defined Network is used. We followed the approach in which collection of the traffic statistics from the various switches is done. After collection we calculated the packet rate and bandwidth which shoots up to high values when attack take place. The abrupt increase detects the attack which is then prevented by changing the forwarding logic of the host nodes to drop the packets instead of forwarding. After this, no more packets will be forwarded and then we also delete the forwarding rule in the flow table. Hence, we are finding out the change in packet rate and bandwidth to detect the attack and to prevent the attack we modify the forwarding logic of the switch flow table to drop the packets coming from malicious host instead of forwarding it.

Honeypots have become an important tool for capturing attacks. Hybrid honeypots, including the front end and the back end, are widely used in research because of the scalability of the front end and the high interactivity of the back end. However, traditional hybrid honeypots have some problems that the flow control is difficult and topology simulation is not realistic. This paper proposes a new architecture based on SDN applied to the hybrid honeypot system for network topology simulation and attack traffic migration. Our system uses the good expansibility and controllability of the SDN controller to simulate a large and realistic network to attract attackers and redirect high-level attacks to a high-interaction honeypot for attack capture and further analysis. It improves the deficiencies in the network spoofing technology and flow control technology in the traditional honeynet. Finally, we set up the experimental environment on the mininet and verified the mechanism. The test results show that the system is more intelligent and the traffic migration is more stealthy.

The zero-day attack in networks exploits an undiscovered vulnerability, in order to affect/damage networks or programs. The term “zero-day” refers to the number of days available to the software or the hardware vendor to issue a patch for this new vulnerability. Currently, the best-known defense mechanism against the zero-day attacks focuses on detection and response, as a prevention effort, which typically fails against unknown or new vulnerabilities. To the best of our knowledge, this attack has not been widely investigated for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). Therefore, in this work we are motivated to develop anew zero-day attack detection and prevention mechanism, which is designed and implemented for SDN using a modified sandbox tool, named Cuckoo. Our experiments results, under UNIX system, show that our proposed design successfully stops zero-day malwares by isolating the infected client, and thus, prevents these malwares from infesting other clients.

The emergence of Software Defined Network (SDN) and its promises in networking technology has gotten every stakeholder excited. However, it is believed that every technological development comes with its own challenges of which the most prominent in this case is security. This paper presents a real time detection of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the SDN and a control method based on the sFlow mitigation technology. sFlow analyses samples of packets collected from the network traffic and generates handling rules to be sent to the controller in case of an attack detection. The implementation was done by emulating the network in Mininet which runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) and it was shown that the proposed method effectively detects and mitigates DDoS attacks.

The motivation behind Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is to allow services and network capabilities to be managed through a central control point. Moving Target Defense (MTD) introduces a constantly changing environment in order to delay or prevent attacks on a system. For the effective use of MTD, SDN can be used to help confuse the attacker from gathering legitimate information about the network. This paper investigates how SDN can be used for some network based MTD techniques and evaluate the benefits of integrating techniques in SDN and MTD. In the experiment, network assets are kept hidden from inside and outside attackers. Furthermore, the SDN controller is programed to perform IP mutation to keep changing real IP addresses of the underlying hosts by assigning each host a virtual IP address at a configured mutation rate to prevent attackers from stealing the real IP addresses or using fake IP addresses. The paper demonstrates experimental evaluation of the MTD technique using the Ryu controller and mininet. The results show that the MTD technique can be easily integrated into the SDN environment to use virtual IP addresses for hosts to reduce the chance of poisoning attacks.

Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) promise to overcome the often complex and error-prone operation of tradi- tional computer networks, by enabling programmabil- ity, automation and verifiability. Yet, SDNs also in- troduce new challenges, for example due to the asyn- chronous communication channel between the logically centralized control platform and the switches in the data plane. In particular, the asynchronous commu- nication of network update commands (e.g., OpenFlow FlowMod messages) may lead to transient inconsisten- cies, such as loops or bypassed waypoints (e.g., fire- walls). One approach to ensure transient consistency even in asynchronous environments is to employ smart scheduling algorithms: algorithms which update subsets of switches in each communication round only, where each subset in itself guarantees consistency. In this demo, we show how to change routing policies in a transiently consistent manner. We demonstrate two al- gorithms, namely, Wayup [5] and Peacock [4], which partition the network updates sent from SDN controller towards OpenFlow software switches into multiple rounds as per respective algorithms. Later, the barrier mes- sages are utilized to ensure reliable network updates.

The advancement of software-defined networking (SDN) technology is highly dependent on the successful transformations from in-house research ideas to real-life products. To enable such transformations, a testbed offering scalable and high fidelity networking environment for testing and evaluating new/existing designs is extremely valuable. Mininet, the most popular SDN emulator by far, is designed to achieve both accuracy and scalability by running unmodified code of network applications in lightweight Linux Containers. How- ever, Mininet cannot guarantee performance fidelity under high workloads, in particular when the number of concurrent active events is more than the number of parallel cores. In this project, we develop a lightweight virtual time system in Linux container and integrate the system with Mininet, so that all the containers have their own virtual clocks rather than using the physical system clock which reflects the se- rialized execution of multiple containers. With the notion of virtual time, all the containers perceive virtual time as if they run independently and concurrently. As a result, inter- actions between the containers and the physical system are artificially scaled, making a network appear to be ten times faster from the viewpoint of applications within the contain- ers than it actually is. We also design an adaptive virtual time scheduling subsystem in Mininet, which is responsible to balance the experiment speed and fidelity. Experimen- tal results demonstrate that embedding virtual time into Mininet significantly enhances its performance fidelity, and therefore, results in a useful platform for the SDN community to conduct scalable experiments with high fidelity.

Realistic and scalable testing systems are critical to evaluate network applications and protocols to ensure successful real system deployments. Container-based network emula- tion is attractive because of the combination of many desired features of network simulators and physical testbeds . The success of Mininet, a popular software- defined networking (SDN) emulation testbed, demonstrates the value of such approach that we can execute unmodified binary code on a large- scale emulated network with lightweight OS-level vir- tualization techniques. However, an ordinary network em- ulator uses the system clock across all the containers even if a container is not being scheduled to run. This leads to the issue of temporal fidelity, especially with high workloads. Virtual time sheds the light on the issue of preserving tem- poral fidelity for large-scale emulation. The key insight is to trade time with system resources via precisely scaling the time of interactions between containers and physical devices by a factor of n, hence, making an emulated network ap- pear to be n times faster from the viewpoints of applications in the container. In this paper, we develop a lightweight Linux-container-based virtual time system and integrate the system to Mininet for fidelity and scalability enhancement. We also design an adaptive time dilation scheduling mod- ule for balancing speed and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that (1) with virtual time, Mininet is able to accurately emulate a network n times larger in scale, where n is the scaling factor, with the system behaviors closely match data obtained from a physical testbed; and (2) with the adaptive time dilation scheduling, we reduce the running time by 46% with little accuracy loss. Finally, we present a case study using the virtual-time-enabled Mininet to evalu- ate the limitations of equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing in a data center network.