A Novel Trust-based Framework for Multi-Plane Security in Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new architectural concept in networking. It adds programmability, resulting in greater flexibility in network management. But it also raises a lot of security concerns. At different planes, SDN employs a variety of network elements, including applications, controllers, and switches, as well as a variety of communication techniques, including APIs and protocols like OpenFlow. Having a single security framework that applies to the entire SDN infrastructure is therefore difficult. Many security measures, including trust-based security frameworks, have been proposed; however, they are only applicable to either the North-Bound Interface (NBI) or the South-Bound Interface (SBI) and not to the entire SDN architecture.
The proposed framework assigns a common trust score based on the behavior of the applications (NBI) and hosts (SBI). Each network entity's trust scores indicate how trustworthy it is. Additionally, the framework mitigates the attacks by blocking the network entities based on trust scores when they fall below a set threshold value. The framework gives the network administrator the option to select the attack detection method, as well as the option of setting the threshold and penalty levels to block entities in the environment. The framework's flexibility will make it easier for the security team to detect low-trust network entities, set priorities, and conduct further research on the threat. This framework can be applied to traditional networks as well as Hybrid-SDN network deployments, in addition to working with SDN.