Reaching Consensus with Byzantine Faulty Controllers in Software-Defined Networks

Chien-Fu Cheng,Gautam Srivastava,Chu-Chiao Hsu,Jerry Chun-Wei Lin,Keping Yu

doi:10.1155/2021/6662175

Abstract

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud computing are both popular applications that are based on the Internet. However, the traditional networking structure can no longer support the transmission of the huge number of packets required by cloud computing and IoT. Therefore, a new-generation architecture, software-defined networking (SDN), came into being. The new-generation SDN can control routing through software, making flexible and convenient management a key feature of SDN. However, attacks and threats are prevalent in today’s networking environment. When an SDN controller encounters a hacker attack or virus infection, it will not function properly. Hence, we need to design a fault-tolerant mechanism for the above environment. In this paper, a fault-tolerant consensus protocol is proposed to improve the fault tolerance of SDNs with multiple controllers.

Highlights

With the flourishing enhancement of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), the scale of the Internet has grown at a very rapid rate [1,2,3,4,5]
software-defined networking (SDN) controllers may not work normally when it is encountered by hackers or virus infection
To provide a reliable SDN with multiple-controller architecture, we need a mechanism that ensures the correctness of the computing results even if any controller has a fault or is under attack

Summary

Introduction

With the flourishing enhancement of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), the scale of the Internet has grown at a very rapid rate [1,2,3,4,5]. Unlike the crash fault or omission fault, a Byzantine fault may cause a controller to send wrong messages or conspire with other faulty devices to interfere with the operation of nonfaulty controllers, thereby delivering incorrect computing results These malicious behaviours include, for example, sending an incorrect flow-entry to the switch to prevent packets from being delivered to the correct destination and sending a specific flow-entry to the switch to enable the attacker to receive a copy of all the packets delivered to or sent from a particular host (i.e., eavesdropping packets). To provide a reliable SDN with multiple-controller architecture, we need a mechanism that ensures the correctness of the computing results even if any controller has a fault or is under attack. (3) By solving the consensus problem in SDN with multiple-controller architecture, we can create a highly reliable networking environment.

Preliminaries

Concept and Approach

An Execution Example

Conclusion