Teaching software‐defined network security through malicious tenant detection

Abstract

Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) has radically changed how we manage our network, increasing flexibility, and enabling network programmability. Providing security for tenants is one of the most significant issues in SDN. In this paper, our goal is to introduce with an educational use case, four types of attack vectors associated with malicious tenants that seriously challenge the SDN foundation. We also provide suggestions to teach how to investigate the mitigation of these techniques against the attacks. Our solution, to be tested in the classroom, introduce an approach that utilizes several concepts, such as a topological graph to detect malicious tenants. Unlike other methods to teach how to secure SDNs, our proposed approach teaches how to detect and secure a system without requiring any changes to the underlying protocols.