Efficient and low‐cost defense against distributed denial‐of‐service attacks in SDN‐based networks

Abstract

SummaryDistributed are common threats in many networks, where attackers attempt to make victim servers unavailable to other users by flooding them with worthless requests. These attacks cannot be easily stopped by firewalls, since they forge lots of connections to victims with various IP addresses. The paper aims to exploit the software‐defined networking (SDN) technique to defend against DDoS attacks. However, the controller has to handle lots of connections launched by DDoS attacks, which burdens it with a heavy load and degrades SDN's performance. Therefore, the paper proposes an efficient and low‐cost DDoS defense (ELD) mechanism for SDN. It adopts a nested reverse‐exponential data storage scheme to help the controller efficiently record the information of packets in the limited memory. Once there are many packets with high IP variability sent to a certain server and this situation lasts for a while, then a DDoS attack is likely happening. In this case, the controller asks switches to block malicious connections by installing flow rules. Experimental results verify that the ELD mechanism rapidly recognizes protocol‐based DDoS attacks and stops them in time, including TCP SYN flood, UDP flood, and ICMP flood, and also greatly reduces the overhead for the controller to defend against attacks. Moreover, ELD can distinguish DDoS flows from legitimate ones with similar features such as elephant flows and impulse flows, thereby eliminating false alarms.