Abstract
Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a technology which can replace the prevalent vendor based proprietary CLI networking devices. SDN has introduced applications based network control and provided various opportunities and challenges for research and innovation in these networks. Despite many advantages and opportunities in SDN, security is a matter of concern for developers who want to invest in SDN. In this paper we are analyzing the SDN security issues with their countermeasures. We have generalized four use cases threat model that should cover security requirements of SDN. These use cases are: (I) protect controllers from applications, (II) inter-controller protection, (III) protecting data plane or switches from controller, (IV) protecting controllers from malicious switches. We found that these SDN components are inter-related if one is secure another one is already secure. We also compared the SDN and traditional network security in terms of these four use cases and provide the insights for protection mechanism and security enhancements. A framework for the development of a SDN security application has been presented based on ryu controller. We believe that our threat model will help various researchers and developers to understand current security requirements and provide a ready reference to tackle vulnerabilities and threats in this area. Finally, we identify some open research problems and future research directions with a proposed security architecture.
Highlights
Traditional network (TN) devices are very powerful and provide various networking control functions in the form of routers, switches, firewall and load balancer etc
In TNs network controlling elements are inside the network devices e.g. routers and switches but in Software Defined Networking (SDN) it has been decoupled from the devices to a central controller
We will try to analyze four use cases in TNs www.ijacsa.thesai.org which we implemented in SDN in above section and it will give a clear picture of security problems and challenges in SDN with their possible solutions
Summary
Traditional network (TN) devices are very powerful and provide various networking control functions in the form of routers, switches, firewall and load balancer etc. A lot of new models are being developed every year with more processing powers and updated software versions by the vendors and customer need to replace the previous hardware for getting new updated software functions These proprietary devices are very costly and have their own way of configuration through CLI, having some specific commands and different vendors have different commands to communicate with these devices. The idea of SDN is to use vendor specific hardware and we are free to choose software as per network demands irrespective of hardware This arrangement of network functionality provides various opportunities for research and innovation in these networks. SDN is evolving and it has various advantages or traditional networks like dynamic control, programmability and a complete view of the network As it is a new technology security solutions in SDN need to redefine and it provides various challenges and opportunities.
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