SDN‐chain: Privacy‐preserving protocol for software defined networks using blockchain

Abstract

AbstractSoftware‐defined networking (SDN) is a programmable architecture for networking domain in which the security is provided by devising the network policies with the help of the network administrator. This is very cumbersome for the administrator to handle different attacks at various planes in SDN architecture. Blockchain can be used to prevent various attacks in SDN by providing a decentralization authentication environment. In this article, a secure Blockchain‐based privacy‐preserving protocol is proposed to thwart various security vulnerabilities in the SDN architecture. The proposed approach uses Modified‐Delegated Proof of Stake as the consensus protocol to ensure safety and reliability in the network. Besides, a security protocol is designed using cryptographic primitives and analyzed using a detailed security analysis. Initially, the consensus protocols are implemented using solidity smart contracts and deployed to the public Blockchain using Ethereum. Consequently, the proposed approach is simulated on OMNet++ using INET framework. The experimental results show that the proposed SDN‐Chain is secure, efficient, less incentive to centralize, and practically implementable in resource‐limited wireless and mobile environments.