Real-time security approach to software-defined networking (SDN)

The emergence of Software-defined network (SDN) with its ability to enhance programmability in networking and the separation of the control plane from the infrastructural plane has shifted the paradigm in networking. The centralization of the control plane requires robust and real-time security techniques to protect it from any sign of vulnerabilities associated with the network such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM), etc. In this study, a real-time security approach that can detect and mitigate the security vulnerabilities susceptible to the SDN network is proposed. The proposed method adopts the sFlow technique and the IPSec protocol for security implementation. A secure network architecture was built and implemented on Mininet which runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method. The method not only can detect attacks on the network but does it in real-time which allows it to quickly start a mitigation process to protect the network from being overwhelmed.