Title: Software-defined network planes - a survey on attacks and countermeasure

Authors: D. Sendil Vadivu; Narendran Rajagopalan

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, Karaikal, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, Karaikal, India

Abstract: A smartly managed framework that enables the network to be configured via software application is termed software-defined networks (SDN). SDN gracefully abstracts the network management regardless of the underlying technology. The fundamental drive of SDN is to move from distributed control architecture to centralised control architecture. Though SDN provides complex security policies that can be easily customised to safeguard the network, it suffers from a single point of failure and opens to many security challenges. In order to withstand this centralised architecture, it is crucial to study the security aspects of the SDN. This paper surveys the various security techniques of the SDN stack from the perspective of individual layers.

Keywords: software-defined network; SDN; SDN planes; security; flow table; OpenFlow; attacks; countermeasure.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2023.133900

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2023 Vol.29 No.6, pp.598 - 630

Received: 29 Jul 2022
Accepted: 31 Aug 2022
Published online: 05 Oct 2023 *

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