On Profiling, Benchmarking and Behavioral Analysis of SDN Architecture Under DDoS Attacks
Journal of Network and Systems Management, (March 2023)Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has attracted much attention from research and industrial communities recently as it is more agile and flexible compared to conventional networking technology in offering new network functions and services. By separating the network control functions from the forwarding devices and placing them in a centralized, softwarized and programmable SDN controller, new network functions and services can be easily added into the network in an on-demand manner. However, the centralized control paradigm and the flow-based forwarding principle make the SDN architecture more fragile and vulnerable to malicious actions, such as cyber hijacking or DDoS attacks. In this paper, we focus on analyzing and evaluating negative impacts of DDoS attacks on the SDN architecture. By performing stress tests, the performance of such common SDN controllers as POX, Ryu and Floodlight under DDoS attacks is benchmarked, along with their impacts on the SDN switch and OpenFlow channel. We also address some new threats and vulnerabilities introduced by the nature of SDN.