BWManager: Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks in Software-Defined Networks Through Bandwidth Prediction

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a new networking paradigm that can provide fine-grained network management service. Since the SDN controller makes control decision for the network, it becomes the main target of denial of service (DoS) attacks. In this paper, we propose BWManager to mitigate... which mainly consists mitigate the DoS attacks on the SDN controller with BWManager that mainly consists of four key components: 1) simplified DoS detection module; 2) forecasting engine; 3) priority manager; and 4) scheduler. The simplified DoS detection module calculates a comprehensive judgment score for each switch, which indicates the attacking severity of each switch and is used to decide time slice allocation of the controller. The forecasting engine is the basis of the controller scheduling method and forecasts the bandwidth consumption of users to determine the users’ trust values. The trust values are used by the priority manager to manage multiple buffer queues with different priorities for the users. The scheduler protects the controller and the normal users under DoS attacks by running a weighted Round-Robin algorithm to process flow requests in different priority queues. We evaluate the performance and overhead of BWManager in both hardware and software OpenFlow environments. The results demonstrate that BWManager is effective with a limited overhead.