The increasing incidence of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has made software-defined networking (SDN) more vulnerable to the depletion of controller resources. DDoS attacks prevent the SDN controller from processing all incoming data efficiently, potentially disrupting a network or denying legitimate users access to network services. Thus, the protection of the SDN controller is crucial, especially from the ones that exploit the SDN characteristics. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient detection approach for low- and high-rate DDoS attacks on the controller with a high detection rate and a low false positive rate by adapting a dynamic threshold algorithm rather than a static one and proposing a new rule-based detection mechanism. In addition, the proposed approach was evaluated using eight simulation scenarios representing all potential attacks against the SDN controller in terms of attack traffic rates (low or high), sources (either single or multiple hosts), and targets (single or multiple victims). The experiment results show that the proposed approach is more effective than the existing approaches based on attack detection and false positive rates.

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Software-defined networking (SDN) is a revolutionary innovation in network technology with many desirable features, including flexibility and manageability. Despite those advantages, SDN is vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS), which constitutes a significant threat due to its impact on the SDN network. Despite many security approaches to detect DDoS attacks, it remains an open research challenge. Therefore, this study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to systematically investigate and critically analyze the existing DDoS attack approaches based on machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), or hybrid approaches published between 2014 and 2022. We followed a predefined SLR protocol in two stages on eight online databases to comprehensively cover relevant studies. The two stages involve automatic and manual searching, resulting in 70 studies being identified as definitive primary studies. The trend indicates that the number of studies on SDN DDoS attacks has increased dramatically in the last few years. The analysis showed that the existing detection approaches primarily utilize ensemble, hybrid, and single ML-DL. Private synthetic datasets, followed by unrealistic datasets, are the most frequently used to evaluate those approaches. In addition, the review argues that the limited literature studies demand additional focus on resolving the remaining challenges and open issues stated in this SLR.

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