Abstract
The development of fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication technology has become a major driver to the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. As a promising networking paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN) makes IoT more flexible and agile by decoupling control plane from data plane. With a large number of heterogeneous devices accessing to the network, we need to divide the network into several domains and each domain is managed by an SDN controller. Controllers share topologies with each other to form global view of the entire network, which is used for crossing-domain path routing. However, crossing-domain routing requires global trust between multiple controllers. The reason is that if the malicious controller shares misleading topologies, the rest of controllers may calculate mistaken crossing-domain paths. As a result, packets are forwarded to the domain that is managed by the malicious controller and dropped deliberately, which is known as the black-hole attack. To this end, we present a blockchain-based architecture to ensure secure routing among multiple domains in SDN-enabled IoT networks. All SDN controllers are equipped with blockchains, and they upload abstract topologies to the blockchain via the smart contract. Thus, the genuine view of the entire network can be gained from the blockchain due to its consensus and immutability. In addition, we use the concept of reputation that consists of the local reputation and the global reputation to further protect routing reliability, and the global reputation is reserved in the blockchain. Compared with benchmark architectures, the emulation results show that our proposed method can effectively build trust between multiple controllers and ensure secure routing among multiple domains.
Highlights
Fifth-generation (5G) [1] mobile communication technology has significantly expanded the scope and scale of Internet of ings (IoT) [1] by providing high-speed connections and communications, where billions of smart devices can access to the Internet. ese smart devices with heterogeneous characteristics have generated volumes of data [2]
We further propose the reputation concept according to the verification results, consisting of the global reputation and local reputation. e smart contract will increase the global reputation of the controller that shared correct abstract topology, which we will describe in Section 4. e reputations can reflect controller’s reliability based on its sharing behavior
According to the validation results of the abstract topologies in Section 3, we further propose a mechanism that leverages the reputation concept that consists of the local reputation and the global reputation to reflect the behavior of the software-defined networking (SDN) controllers
Summary
Fifth-generation (5G) [1] mobile communication technology has significantly expanded the scope and scale of Internet of ings (IoT) [1] by providing high-speed connections and communications, where billions of smart devices can access to the Internet. ese smart devices with heterogeneous characteristics (such as phones, sensors, and virtual reality devices) have generated volumes of data [2]. Due to the inherent cryptographic chaining, the malicious behavior can be detected via the hash value [16] To this end, we leverage the method of blockchain to protect secure routing in SDN-enabled multi-controller IoT networks. 2. Related Work e main purpose of this article is to ensure secure routing among multiple domains in SDN-enabled IoT networks. Related Work e main purpose of this article is to ensure secure routing among multiple domains in SDN-enabled IoT networks In this area, there are some existing works. Compared with the previous work, the first difference is that we deeply design the architecture to ensure secure routing among multiple domains using the blockchain technology, which is more specific and practical Another difference is that we use the abstract topologies to meet the network privacy concerns. The packets could be forwarded among multiple domains in security
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