Biblio

Traffic in a backbone network has high forwarding rate requirements, and as the network gets larger, traffic increases and forwarding rates decrease. In a Software Defined Network (SDN), the controller can manage a global view of the network and control the forwarding of network traffic. A deterministic network has different forwarding requirements for the traffic of different priority levels. Static traffic load balancing is not flexible enough to meet the needs of users and may lead to the overloading of individual links and even network collapse. In this paper, we propose a new backbone network load balancing architecture - EDQN (Edge Deep Q-learning Network), which implements queue-based gate-shaping algorithms at the edge devices and load balancing of traffic on the backbone links. With the advantages of SDN, the link utilization of the backbone network can be improved, the delay in traffic transmission can be reduced and the throughput of traffic during transmission can be increased.

The vast proliferation of the connected devices makes the operation of the traditional networks so complex and drops the network performance, particularly, failure cases. In fact, a novel solution is proposed to enable the management of the network resources and services named software defined network (SDN). SDN splits the data plane and the control plane by centralizing all the control plane on one common platform. Further, SDN makes the control plane programmable by offering high flexibility for the network management and monitoring mostly in failure cases. However, the main challenge in SDN is security that is presented as the first barrier for its development. Security in SDN is presented at various levels and forms, particularly, the communication between the data plane and control plane that presents a weak point in SDN framework. In this article, we suggest a new security framework focused on the combination between the trust and awareness concepts (TAS-SDN) for a dynamic southbound communication SDN. Further, TAS-SDN uses trust levels to establish a secure communication between the control plane and data plane. As a result, we discuss the implementation and the performance of TAS-SDN which presents a promote security solution in terms of time execution, complexity and scalability for SDN.

This paper studies Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack detection by adopting the Deep Neural Network (DNN) model in Software Defined Networking (SDN). We first deploy the flow collector module to collect the flow table entries. Considering the detection efficiency of the DNN model, we also design some features manually in addition to the features automatically obtained by the flow table. Then we use the preprocessed data to train the DNN model and make a prediction. The overall detection framework is deployed in the SDN controller. The experiment results illustrate DNN model has higher accuracy in identifying attack traffic than machine learning algorithms, which lays a foundation for the defense against DDoS attack.

DDoS attacks produce a lot of traffic on the network. DDoS attacks may be fought in a novel method thanks to the rise of Software Defined Networking (SDN). DDoS detection and data gathering may lead to larger system load utilization among SDN as well as systems, much expense of SDN, slow reaction period to DDoS if they are conducted at regular intervals. Using the Identification Retrieval algorithm, we offer a new DDoS detection framework for detecting resource scarcity type DDoS attacks. In designed to check low-density DDoS attacks, we employ a combination of network traffic characteristics. The KSVD technique is used to generate a dictionary of network traffic parameters. In addition to providing legitimate and attack traffic models for dictionary construction, the suggested technique may be used to network traffic as well. Matching Pursuit and Wavelet-based DDoS detection algorithms are also implemented and compared using two separate data sets. Despite the difficulties in identifying LR-DoS attacks, the results of the study show that our technique has a detection accuracy of 89%. DDoS attacks are explained for each type of DDoS, and how SDN weaknesses may be exploited. We conclude that machine learning-based DDoS detection mechanisms and cutoff point DDoS detection techniques are the two most prevalent methods used to identify DDoS attacks in SDN. More significantly, the generational process, benefits, and limitations of each DDoS detection system are explained. This is the case in our testing environment, where the intrusion detection system (IDS) is able to block all previously identified threats

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to make a server unresponsive by flooding the target server with a large volume of packets (Volume based DDoS attacks), by keeping connections open for a long time and exhausting the resources (Low and Slow DDoS attacks) or by targeting protocols (Protocol based attacks). Volume based DDoS attacks that flood the target server with a large number of packets are easier to detect because of the abnormality in packet flow. Low and Slow DDoS attacks, however, make the server unavailable by keeping connections open for a long time, but send traffic similar to genuine traffic, making detection of such attacks difficult. This paper proposes a solution to detect and mitigate one such Low and slow DDoS attack, Slowloris in an SDN (Software Defined Networking) environment. The proposed solution involves communication between the detection and mitigation module and the controller of the Software Defined Network to get data to detect and mitigate low and slow DDoS attack.

The new paradigm software-defined networking (SDN) supports network innovation and makes the control of network operations more agile. The flow table is the main component of SDN switch which contains a set of flow entries that define how new flows are processed. Low-rate distributed denial-of-service (LR-DDoS) attacks are difficult to detect and mitigate because they behave like legitimate users. There are many detection methods for LR DDoS attacks in the literature, but none of these methods detect single-packet LR DDoS attacks. In fact, LR DDoS attackers exploit vulnerabilities in the mechanism of congestion control in TCP to either periodically retransmit burst attack packets for a short time period or to continuously launch a single attack packet at a constant low rate. In this paper, the proposed scheme detects LR-DDoS by examining all incoming packets and filtering the single packets sent from different source IP addresses to the same destination at a constant low rate. Sending single packets at a constant low rate will increase the number of flows at the switch which can make it easily overflowed. After detecting the single attack packets, the proposed scheme prevents LR-DDoS at its early stage by deleting the flows created by these packets once they reach the threshold. According to the results of the experiment, the scheme achieves 99.47% accuracy in this scenario. In addition, the scheme has simple logic and simple calculation, which reduces the overhead of the SDN controller.

IoT connects a large number of physical objects with the Internet that capture and exchange real-time information for service provisioning. Traditional network management schemes face challenges to manage vast amounts of network traffic generated by IoT services. Software-defined networking (SDN) and information-centric networking (ICN) are two complementary technologies that could be integrated to solve the challenges of different aspects of IoT service provisioning. ICN offers a clean-slate design to accommodate continuously increasing network traffic by considering content as a network primitive. It provides a novel solution for information propagation and delivery for large-scale IoT services. On the other hand, SDN allocates overall network management responsibilities to a central controller, where network elements act merely as traffic forwarding components. An SDN-enabled network supports ICN without deploying ICN-capable hardware. Therefore, the integration of SDN and ICN provides benefits for large-scale IoT services. This article provides a comprehensive survey on software-defined information-centric Internet of Things (SDIC-IoT) for IoT service provisioning. We present critical enabling technologies of SDIC-IoT, discuss its architecture, and describe its benefits for IoT service provisioning. We elaborate on key IoT service provisioning requirements and discuss how SDIC-IoT supports different aspects of IoT services. We define different taxonomies of SDIC-IoT literature based on various performance parameters. Furthermore, we extensively discuss different use cases, synergies, and advances to realize the SDIC-IoT concept. Finally, we present current challenges and future research directions of IoT service provisioning using SDIC-IoT.

SDN represents a significant advance for the telecom world, since the decoupling of the control and data planes offers numerous advantages in terms of management dynamism and programmability, mainly due to its software-based centralized control. Unfortunately, these features can be exploited by malicious entities, who take advantage of the centralized control to extend the scope and consequences of their attacks. When this happens, both the legal and network technical fields are concerned with gathering information that will lead them to the root cause of the problem. Although forensics and incident response processes share their interest in the event information, both operate in isolation due to the conceptual and pragmatic challenges of integrating them into SDN environments, which impacts on the resources and time required for information analysis. Given these limitations, the current work focuses on proposing a framework for SDNs that combines the above approaches to optimize the resources to deliver evidence, incorporate incident response activation mechanisms, and generate assumptions about the possible origin of the security problem.

In this paper we present techniques for enhancing the security of south bound infrastructure in SDN which includes OpenFlow switches and end hosts. In particular, the proposed security techniques have three main goals: (i) validation and secure configuration of flow rules in the OpenFlow switches by trusted SDN controller in the domain; (ii) securing the flows from the end hosts; and (iii) detecting attacks on the switches by malicious entities in the SDN domain. We have implemented the proposed security techniques as an application for ONOS SDN controller. We have also validated our application by detecting various OpenFlow switch specific attacks such as malicious flow rule insertions and modifications in the switches over a mininet emulated network.

This paper integrates Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information -Centric Networking (ICN) framework to enable low latency-based stateful routing and caching management by leveraging a novel forwarding and caching strategy. The framework is implemented in a clean- slate environment that does not rely on the TCP/IP principle. It utilizes Pending Interest Tables (PIT) instead of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) to perform data dissemination among peers in the proposed IC-SDN framework. As a result, all data exchanged and cached in the system are organized in chunks with the same interest resulting in reduced packet overhead costs. Additionally, we propose an efficient caching strategy that leverages in- network caching and naming of contents through an IC-SDN controller to support off- path caching. The testbed evaluation shows that the proposed IC-SDN implementation achieves an increased throughput and reduced latency compared to the traditional information-centric environment, especially in the high load scenarios.

ICN (Information-Centric Networking) is a traditional networking approach which focuses on Internet design, while SDN (Software Defined Networking) is known as a speedy and flexible networking approach. Integrating these two approaches can solve different kinds of traditional networking problems. On the other hand, it may expose new challenges. In this paper, we study how these two networking approaches are been combined to form SDN-based ICN architecture to improve network administration. Recent research is explored to identify the SDN-based ICN challenges, provide a critical analysis of the current integration approaches, and determine open issues for further research.

The ongoing expansion of underwater Internet of Things techniques promote diverse categories of maritime intelligent systems, e.g., Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs), Underwater Wireless Networks (UWNs), especially multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) based UWNs have produced many civil and military applications. To enhance the network management and scalability, in this paper, the technique of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technique is introduced, leading to the paradigm of Software-Defined multi-AUV-based UWNs (SD-UWNs). With SD-UWNs, the network architecture is divided into three functional layers: data layer, control layer, and application layer, and the network administration is re-defined by a framework of software-defined beacon. To manage the network, a control model based on artificial potential field and network topology theory is constructed. On account of the efficient data sharing ability of SD-UWNs, a proactive alarming-enabled path planning scheme is proposed, wherein all potential categories of obstacle avoidance scenes are taken into account. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed SD-UWN is more efficient in scheduling the cooperative network function than the traditional approaches and can secure exact path planning.

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) has been utilized for cyber-attack detection mechanisms as it offers highly accurate detection and is able to overcome the limitations of standard machine learning techniques. When applied in a Software-Defined Network (SDN) environment, a DL-based detection mechanism shows satisfying detection performance. However, in the case of adversarial attacks, the detection performance deteriorates. Therefore, in this paper, first, we outline a highly accurate flooding DDoS attack detection framework based on DL for SDN environments. Second, we investigate the performance degradation of our detection framework when being tested with two adversary traffic datasets. Finally, we evaluate three adversarial training procedures for improving the detection performance of our framework concerning adversarial attacks. It is shown that the application of one of the adversarial training procedures can avoid detection performance degradation and thus might be used in a real-time detection system based on continual learning.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that has been very popular due to its advantages over traditional networks with regard to scalability, flexibility, and its ability to solve many security issues. Nevertheless, SDN networks are exposed to new security threats and attacks, especially Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. For this aim, we have proposed a model able to detect and mitigate attacks automatically in SDN networks using Machine Learning (ML). Different than other approaches found in literature which use the native flow features only for attack detection, our model extends the native features. The extended flow features are the average flow packet size, the number of flows to the same host as the current flow in the last 5 seconds, and the number of flows to the same host and port as the current flow in the last 5 seconds. Six ML algorithms were evaluated, namely Logistic Regression (LR), Naive Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and Random Forest (RF). The experiments showed that RF is the best performing ML algorithm. Also, results showed that our model is able to detect attacks accurately and quickly, with a low probability of dropping normal traffic.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking architecture having the concept of separation of control plane and data plane that leads the existing networks to be programmable, dynamically configurable and extremely flexible. This paradigm has huge benefits to organizations and large networks, however, its security is major issue and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack has become a serious concern for the working of SDN. In this article, we have proposed a taxonomy of DDoS Defense Mechanisms in SDN Environment. We have categorized the various DDoS detection and mitigation techniques with respect to switch intelligence, Defense Deployment, Defense Activity and Network Flow Activities.

Over the last few years, the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is attaining much more concern on smart computing devices. With the exponential growth of small devices and at the same time cheap prices of these sensing devices, there raises an important question for the security of the stored information as these devices generate a large amount of private data for observing and controlling purposes. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are current examples of major security threats to IoT devices. As yet, no standard protocol can fully ensure the security of IoT devices. But adaptive decision making along with elasticity and incessant monitoring is required. These difficulties can be resolved with the assistance of Software Defined Networking (SDN) which can viably deal with the security dangers to the IoT devices in a powerful and versatile way without hampering the lightweightness of the IoT devices. Although SDN performs quite well for managing and controlling IoT devices, security is still an open concern. Nonetheless, there are a few challenges relating to the mitigation of DDoS attacks in IoT systems implemented with SDN architecture. In this paper, a brief overview of some of the popular DDoS attack mitigation techniques and their limitations are described. Also, the challenges of implementing these techniques in SDN-based architecture to IoT devices have been presented.

Scalability is one of the effective features of the Software Defined Network (SDN) that allows several devices to communicate with each other. In SDN scalable networks, the number of hosts keeps increasing as per networks need. This increment makes network administrators take a straightforward action to ensure these hosts' authenticity in the network. To address this issue, we proposed a technique to authenticate SDN hosts before permitting them to establish communication with the SDN controller. In this technique, we used the Kerberos authentication protocol to ensure the authenticity of the hosts. Kerberos verifies the hosts' credentials using a centralized server contains all hosts IDs and passwords. This technique eases the secure communication between the hosts and controller and allows the hosts to safely get network rules and policies. The proposed technique ensures the immunity of the network against network attacks.

Modern Intrusion Detection Systems are able to identify and check all traffic crossing the network segments that they are only set to monitor. Traditional network infrastructures use static detection mechanisms that check and monitor specific types of malicious traffic. To mitigate this potential waste of resources and improve scalability across an entire network, we propose a methodology which deploys distributed IDS in a Software Defined Network allowing them to be used for specific types of traffic as and when it appears on a network. The core of our work is the creation of an SDN application that takes input from a Snort IDS instances, thus working as a classifier for incoming network traffic with a static ruleset for those classifications. Our application has been tested on a virtualised platform where it performed as planned holding its position for limited use on static and controlled test environments.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the way of designing and managing networks through programmability. However, programmability also introduces security threats. In this work we address the issue of malicious hosts running malicious applications that bypass the standard SDN based detection mechanisms. The SDN security system we are proposing periodically monitors the system calls utilization of the different SDN applications installed, learns from past system behavior using machine learning classifiers, and thus accurately detects the existence of an unusual activity or a malicious application.

The growing adoption of IoT devices is creating a huge positive impact on human life. However, it is also making the network more vulnerable to security threats. One of the major threats is malicious traffic injection attack, where the hacked IoT devices overwhelm the application servers causing large-scale service disruption. To address such attacks, we propose a Software Defined Networking based predictive alarm manager solution for malicious traffic detection and mitigation at the IoT Gateway. Our experimental results with the proposed solution confirms the detection of malicious flows with nearly 95% precision on average and at its best with around 99% precision.

Internet of Things (IoT) is penetrating into every aspect of our personal lives including our body, our home and our living environment which poses numerous security challenges. The number of heterogeneous connected devices is increasing exponentially in IoT, which in turn increases the attack surface of IoT. This forces the need for uniform, distributed security mechanism which can efficiently detect the attack at faster rate in highly scalable IoT environment. The proposed work satisfies this requirement by providing a security framework which combines Fog computing and Software Defined Networking (SDN). The experimental results depicts the effectiveness in protecting the IoT applications at faster rate

Ensuring the network security, resists the malicious traffic attacks as much as possible, and ensuring the network security, the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are combined. Then, a Software Defined Networking (SDN) anomaly detection architecture is built and continuously optimized to ensure network security as much as possible and enhance the reliability of the detection architecture. The results show that the proposed network architecture can greatly improve the accuracy of detection, and its performance will be different due to the different number of CNN layers. When the two-layer CNN structure is selected, its performance is the best among all algorithms. Especially, the accuracy of GRU- CNN-2 is 98.7%, which verifies that the proposed method is effective. Therefore, under deep learning, the utilization of GRU- CNN to explore and optimize the SDN anomaly detection is of great significance to ensure information transmission security in the future.

The whole Software-Defined Networking (SDN) system might be out of service when the control plane is overloaded by control plane saturation attacks. In this attack, a malicious host can manipulate massive table-miss packets to exhaust the control plane resources. Even though many studies have focused on this problem, systems still suffer from more influenced switches because of centralized mitigation policies, and long recovery delay because of the remaining attack flows. To solve these problems, we propose FSDM, a Fast recovery Saturation attack Detection and Mitigation framework. For detection, FSDM extracts the distribution of Control Channel Occupation Rate (CCOR) to detect the attack and locates the port that attackers come from. For mitigation, with the attacker's location and distributed Mitigation Agents, FSDM adopts different policies to migrate or block attack flows, which influences fewer switches and protects the control plane from resource exhaustion. Besides, to reduce the system recovery delay, FSDM equips a novel functional module called Force\_Checking, which enables the whole system to quickly clean up the remaining attack flows and recovery faster. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments, which show that, with the increasing of attack PPS (Packets Per Second), FSDM only suffers a minor recovery delay increase. Compared with traditional methods without cleaning up remaining flows, FSDM saves more than 81% of ping RTT under attack rate ranged from 1000 to 4000 PPS, and successfully reduced the delay of 87% of HTTP requests time under large attack rate ranged from 5000 to 30000 PPS.

Majority of the daily and business activities nowadays are integrated and interconnected to the world across national, geographic and boundaries. Securing the Internet of Things (IoT) system is a challenge as these low powered devices in IoT system are very vulnerable to cyber-attacks and this will reduce the reliability of the system. Software Defined Network (SDN) intends to greatly facilitate the policy enforcement and dynamic network reconfiguration. This paper presents several architectures in the integration of IoT via SDN to improve security in the network and system.

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.