Enhanced Solid-Flow: An Enhanced Flow Rules Security Mechanism for SDN

摘要

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new method that aims to virtualize networking by decoupling data plan from the control plan. As this technique impacted many actors in the networking community because of its suppleness, programmability, and central decision management. Many interrogations have been raised about problems that come with it. One of the biggest concerns related to SDN is security. This trait is crucial when determining to implement the SDN as a solution or not. Applications plane contains applications that can generate flow rules, those applications are allowed to access the data store present within the controller to store their rules, which introduces vulnerabilities in the network making the flow rules untrustworthy. Access to data store can only be trusted if the security problems inherent in software-defined networks are resolved. In this paper, we propose an enhanced SOLID-FLOW to improve flow rules database integrity inside the SDN controller. First, we discuss security threats related to SDN mechanisms regarding the control layer. Secondly, we debate appropriate solutions that have been presented in the literature to address security-related issues. Then we present our enhanced mechanism. Finally, we discuss our implementation use case and its results. The last section will provide a conclusion and an overview of future works.