Summary Design flaws and vulnerabilities inherent to network protocols, devices, and services make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a persisting threat in the cyberspace, despite decades of research efforts in the area. The historical vertical integration of traditional IP networks limited the solution space, forcing researchers to tweak network protocols while maintaining global compatibility and proper service to legitimate flows. The advent of Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) and advances in Programmable Data Planes (PDP) changed the state of affairs and brought novel possibilities to deal with such attacks. In summary, the ability of bringing together network intelligence to a control plane, and offloading flow processing tasks to the forwarding plane, opened up interesting opportunities for network security researchers unlike ever. In this article, we dive into recent research that relies on SDN and PDP to detect, mitigate, and prevent DDoS attacks. Our literature review takes into account the SDN layered view as defined in RFC7426 and focuses on the data, control, and application planes. We follow a systematic methodology to capture related articles and organize them into a taxonomy of DDoS defense mechanisms focusing on three facets: activity level, deployment location, and cooperation degree. From the analysis of existing work, we also highlight key research gaps that may foster future research in the field.

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Summary Software defined network (SDN) is a paradigm that emphasizes the separation of the control plane from the data plane, offering advantages such as flexibility and programmability. However, from a security perspective, SDN also introduces new vulnerabilities due to the communication required between these planes. SYN Flood attacks are typical distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) attacks that especially challenge network administrators since they produce a large volume of semi‐open TCP connections to a target, compromising its availability. Most of the current solutions to detect and mitigate these attacks are designed to operate at the control plane, imposing an additional overhead on controller functions. Moreover, traffic‐blocking mechanisms, a widely used alternative to protect network resources, have the drawback of restricting legitimate traffic. This work proposes DataPlane‐ML, an integrated solution to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks on SDN, acting directly in the data plane. DataPlane‐ML uses machine learning techniques for attack detection and a mitigation solution based on the node's reputation to avoid blocking legitimate traffic during an attack. Experimental results show that DataPlane‐ML is prefix≈26%$$ \approx 26\% $$ faster than statistical‐based solutions for attack detection while presenting better accuracy. Moreover, the DataPlane‐ML mitigation solution can preserve more than 95%$$ 95\% $$ of legitimate traffic during an attack.