Towards secure and dependable software-defined networks

By Diego Luis Kreutz, Fernando M. V. Ramos, Paulo Jorge Esteves Veríssimo. HotSDN '13, 2013

734 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Software-defined networking empowers network operators with more flexibility to program their networks. With SDN, network management moves from codifying functionality in terms of low-level device configurations to building software that facilitates network management and debugging. By separating the complexity of state distribution from network specification, SDN provides new ways to solve long-standing problems in networking --- routing, for instance --- while simultaneously allowing the use of security and dependability techniques, such as access control or multi-path. However, the security and dependability of the SDN itself is still an open issue. In this position paper we argue for the need to build secure and dependable SDNs by design. As a first step in this direction we describe several threat vectors that may enable the exploit of SDN vulnerabilities. We then sketch the design of a secure and dependable SDN control platform as a materialization of the concept here advocated. We hope that this paper will trigger discussions in the SDN community around these issues and serve as a catalyser to join efforts from the networking and security & dependability communities in the ultimate goal of building resilient control planes.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bf2e0f409ed0ae1342d219ffcc756128878d298

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Software-defined networking (SDN): a survey (2016, background): “[60] Discussing the important aspects of a secure and dependable SDN architecture as well as threats/ vulnerabilities.”
DDoS Attack Protection in the Era of Cloud Computing and Software-Defined Networking (2014, background): “Other researchers [5,6] focus on exploiting the benefits of cloud or SDN to defend DDoS attacks.”
AmoebaNet: An SDN-enabled network service for big data science (2018, neutral): “SDN security or applying SDN to address security problems are discussed in(Zheng et al., 2016; Zhaogang et al., 2016; Scott-Hayward et al., 2013; Shin et al., 2013; Kreutz et al., 2013) and these are also hot research areas.”
InSDN: A Novel SDN Intrusion Dataset (2020, background): “(2013) defined various attack vectors that can tamper the SDN architecture [38].”
Software Defined Networking Architecture, Security and Energy Efficiency: A Survey (2017, background): “To protect from these threat vectors, defense solutions have been proposed in [103] but the most of which are still open to be explored.”
Sdn Security: A Survey (2013, background): “Without a signi ﬁ cant increase in focus on security, it will not be possible for SDN to support the evolving capability associated with, for example, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) [3].”
A Survey on Emerging SDN and NFV Security Mechanisms for IoT Systems (2019, background): “[183] have suggested manifold approaches: (i) stringent authentication mechanisms and trust models to cope with common identity-based attacks; (ii) sandboxing techniques to isolate domains through well-defined interfaces that allow minimal set of operations; (iii) tamper-proof devices to securely st”
DDoS Attack Detection and Mitigation Using SDN: Methods, Practices, and Solutions (2017, background): “This is specifically true in the absence of a robust and secure controller platform [17] In this context, conducive efforts are needed in exploring innovative methods for ensuring security of an SDN controller.”
SPHINX: Detecting Security Attacks in Software-Defined Networks (2015, methodology): “Our evaluation shows that SPHINX is capable of detecting attacks in SDNs in realtime with low performance overheads, and requires no changes to the controllers for deployment.”
DISCO: Distributed multi-domain SDN controllers (2013, background): “SDN controller represents a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF), which makes SDN architectures highly vulnerable to disruptions and attacks [4].”
Security in Software Defined Networks: A Survey (2015, positive): “[32] presented threat vectors to describe security vulnerabilities in SDN.”
A Survey and a Layered Taxonomy of Software-Defined Networking (2014, background): “[157], new attack surface areas are introduced by SDN deployment.”
A Survey on Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges and Design Requirements (2017, background): “The authors in [60] further identify seven potential security attacks on SDNs: 1) Forged or faked traffic flows.”
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in Cloud Computing Environments: A Survey, Some Research Issues, and Challenges (2016, methodology): “The security of those communications is as strong as its weakest link, which could be a self-signed certificate, a compromised Certificate Authority, or vulnerable applications and libraries [34].”
A Survey of Security in Software Defined Networks (2016, background): “A few of these analyses [21], [24], [27]”
Deep learning approach for Network Intrusion Detection in Software Defined Networking (2016, background): “[8], there are seven threat vectors in SDN.”
AVANT-GUARD: scalable and vigilant switch flow management in software-defined networks (2013, background): “Our work is inspired by several parallel studies that explore security threats in SDNs [1, 14, 28] [25].”
Security for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “The security challenges introduced by applications can be due to open APIs in network equipment, lack of trust mechanisms between applications and controllers, and lack of proper authentication and authorization techniques for applications, mainly third party applications [198].”