Software-Defined Networking: An Evolving Network Architecture—Programmability and Security Perspective

Abstract

Software-defined networking is an evolving network architecture beheading the traditional network architecture focusing its disadvantages in a limited perspective. A couple of decades before, programming and networking were viewed as different domains which today with the lights of SDN bridging themselves together. This is to overcome the existing challenges faced by the networking domain and an attempt to propose cost-efficient effective and feasible solutions. Changes to the existing network architecture are inevitable considering the volume of connected devices and the data being held together. SDN introduces a decoupled architecture and brings customization within the network making it easy to configure, manage, and troubleshoot. This paper focuses on the evolving network architecture, the software-defined networking. Unlike a generic view on the evolving network, which makes work as a review, this work addresses various perspectives of the architecture leaving it an intermediate work in between the review of the literature and implementation, contributing towards factors like the design, programmability, security, security behaviors, and security lapses. This paper also analyses various weak points of the architecture and evolves the attack vectors in each plane leaving a conclusion to further progress towards identifying the impacts of the attacks and proposing mitigation strategies.

Implementation of a SDN Architecture Observer: Detection of Failure, Distributed Denial-of-Service and Unauthorized Intrusion

“…Te network is sensitive to perturbations that afect the controller, particularly in the case of an attack that can lead to a malicious controller. Such an attack allows the attacker to have access to the entire network and to redefne, for example, the previously confgured routing policy [40]. A multiple-controller architecture was proposed in [29] to prevent unsecured behaviour.…”

A Review on Efficient Energy Consumption in Software-Defined Networking Using Routing Aware Protocols

“…With the applications being above the controller in the application plane, the designed controller's operations such as managing, configuring along with monitoring will be automated by utilizing customized programming characteristics. The communication betwixt the controller and the application is denoted as northbound Application Programming Interface (API) [14]. For deciding the sophisticated network resource utilization techniques along with for optimizing the underlying network fabric as per the improving service requisites, Software developers could wield the higher level of network abstraction provided through the control plane [15].…”

A Link Fabrication Attack Mitigation Approach (LiFAMA) for Software Defined Networks

“…Application Layer: It contains network applications used by organisations, such as intrusion detection systems, firewalls, traffic policies and load balancers. In traditional networks, all the above applications would run on specialised hardware, but SDN replaces that specialized hardware with an application that uses the controller to manage behaviour of the hardware devices [16]. It is responsible for handling security and business applications, in summary.…”

“…Control Layer: This layer comprises centralised SDN controller software where all the intelligence of the SDN resides. The controller manages traffic flow and policies throughout the network [16] and packet dropping through programming [1]. It controls the overall SDN functions.…”