Distributed Shadow Controllers based Moving Target Defense Framework for Control Plane Security

Abstract

Moving Target Defense (MTD) has drawn substantial attention of research community in recent past for designing secure networks. MTD significantly reduced the asymmetric advantage of attackers by constantly changing the attack surface. In this paper Software Defined Networking (SDN) based MTD framework SMTSC (SDN based MTD framework using Shadow Controllers) has been proposed. Although the previous work in SDN based MTD targets the Data plane security, we exploit MTD for the protection of Control plane of SDN. The proposed solution uses the concept of Shadow Controllers for producing dynamism in order to provide security at the Control plane of SDN environment. We proposed the concepts of Shadow Controllers for throttling the reconnaissance attacks targeting Controllers. The advantage of our approach is multifold. First it exploits the mechanism of MTD for providing security in the Control plane. The other advantage is that the multi-controller approach provides higher availability in the SDN network. Another critical gain is the lower computational overhead of SMTSC. Mininet and ONOS Controller are used to implement the proposed framework. The effectiveness and overheads of the framework is evaluated in terms of attacker’s effort, defender cost and complexity introduced in the network. Results demonstrated promising trends for the protection of Control plan of SDN environment.