Enhancing the security of blockchain-based software defined networking through trust-based traffic fusion and filtration

Abstract

With the rapid development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), more smart devices can be connected to the Internet, resulting in a dramatic increase of data transmission and communication. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which separates the control planes and data planes, is considered as a promising solution to provide the scale and versatility necessary for IoT. However, SDN still suffers from several challenges, i.e., the centralized control plane would be a single point of failure. With the wide adoption of blockchain applications, such technologies can have a positive impact on SDN’s performance, i.e., blockchains allow non-confident individuals to interact with each other without the need for a central authority. However, attackers can still inject traffic to influence blockchain nodes from normal operations. Motivated by the recent development of blockchains and SDN, in this work, we focus on blockchain-based SDN and develop BSDNFilter, an IDS-based security mechanism that builds a trust-based filtration by using traffic fusion and aggregation to handle and reduce malicious traffic. Through collaborating with an IT organization, our evaluation in a real blockchain-based SDN environment demonstrates that our BSDNFilter is able to achieve better filtration performance against flooding attacks than similar approaches.