Biblio

The Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigm, often referred to as a radical new idea in networking, promises to dramatically simplify network management by enabling innovation through network programmability. However, notable security issues, such as app-to-control threats, remain a significant concern that impedes SDN from being widely adopted. To cope with those app-to-control threats, this paper proposes a solution to securely deploy valid network applications while protecting the SDN controller against the injection of the malicious application. This problem is mitigated by proposing a novel SDN architecture, dubbed SENAD, which splits the well-known SDN controller into: (1) a data plane controller (DPC), and (2) an application plane controller (APC), to secure this latter by design. The role of the DPC is dedicated for interpreting the network rules into OpenFlow entries and maintaining the communication with the data plane. The role of the APC, however, is to provide a secured runtime for deploying the network applications, including authentication, access control, resource isolation, control, and monitoring applications. We show that this approach can easily shield against any deny of service, caused for instance by the resource exhaustion attack or the malicious command injection, that is caused by the co-existence of a malicious application on the controller's runtime. The evaluation of our architecture shows that the packet\_in messages take less than 5 ms to be delivered from the data plane to the application plane on the long range.

The SDN (Software Defined Networking) paradigm rings flexibility to the network management and is an enabler to offer huge opportunities for network programmability. And, to solve the scalability issue raised by the centralized architecture of SDN, multi-controllers deployment (or distributed controllers system) is envisioned. In this paper, we focus on increasing the diversity of SDN control plane so as to enhance the network security. Our goal is to limit the ability of a malicious controller to compromise its neighboring controllers, and by extension, the rest of the controllers. We investigate a heterogeneous Susceptible-Infectious-Susceptible (SIS) epidemic model to evaluate the security performance and propose a coloring algorithm to increase the diversity based on community detection. And the simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can reduce infection rate in control plane and our work shows that diversity must be introduced in network design for network security.