Appraisal of Source IP Validation Techniques in SDN

Abstract

Popularity of Software Defined Network (SDN) technology is spreading rapidly and corporate networks are deploying to take advantages of its features. Control & Data planes are segregated in SDN and simple forwarding devices enabled with OpenFlow protocol is used to forward data planes. The responsibility of control planes are taken by controller into SDN network. The data packets are generated by source host and forwarded to destination host by seeing destination address of such packet without validating source host address. Flow of data packets is controlled by controller setting up required flow entries into flow table of forwarding devices. Initially forwarding devices do not have any security & control and they are not able to forward traffic generated by attached hosts. Data packets of attached hosts are sent to the controller by forwarding devices for generation of control packets and setup necessary flow entries into device flow table. Source IP spoofed attacks may be setup by attacker in this situation and perform different type of attacks. There are some techniques for prevention and mitigation from such attacks. In this study, we offer an analysis of available source address validation techniques for SDN environment. The study discussed various features, limitations and gaps of source address validation solutions and provided various areas in SDN Security for future research.