Biblio

OpenFlow has been the main standard protocol of software defined networking (SDN) since the launch of this new networking paradigm. It is a programmable network protocol that controls traffic flows among switches and routers regardless of their platforms. Its security relies on the optional implementation of Transport Layer Security (TLS) which has been proven vulnerable. The aim of this research was to develop a secured OpenFlow, so-called Secured-OF. A stateful firewall was used to store state information for further analysis. Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) was used to learn denial-of-service attack and distributed denial-of-service attack. It analyzes packet states to determine the nature of an attack and adds that piece of information to the flow table entry. The proposed Secured-OF model in Ryu controller was evaluated with several performance metrics. The analytical evaluation of the proposed Secured-OF scheme was performed on an emulated network. The results showed that the proposed Secured-OF scheme offers a high attack detection accuracy at 99.5%. In conclusion, it was able to improve the security of the OpenFlow controller dramatically with trivial performance degradation compared to an SDN with no security implementation.

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.