A Learning Automata-Based DDoS Attack Defense Mechanism in Software Defined Networks

The primary innovations behind Software Defined Networks (SDN)are the decoupling of the control plane from the data plane and centralizing the network management through a specialized application running on the controller. Despite all its capabilities, the introduction of various architectural entities of SDN poses many security threats and potential target. Especially, Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) is a rapidly growing attack that poses a tremendous threat to both control plane and forwarding plane of SDN. Asthe control layer is vulnerable to DDoS attack, the goal of this paper is to provide a defense system which is based on Learning Automata (LA) concepts. It is a self-operating mechanism that responds to a sequence of actions in a certain way to achieve a specific goal. The simulation results show that this scheme effectively reduces the TCP connection setup delay due to DDoS attack.