Early Detection of DDoS Attacks Against Software Defined Network Controllers

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new network architecture that has an operating system. Unlike conventional production networks, SDN allows more flexibility in network management using that operating system that is called the controller. The main advantage of having a controller in the network is the separation of the forwarding and the control planes, which provides central control over the network. Although central control is the major advantage of SDN, it is also a single point of failure if it is made unreachable by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this paper, that single point of failure is addressed by utilizing the controller to detect such attacks and protect the SDN architecture of the network in its early stages. The two main objectives of this paper are to (1) make use of the controller’s broad view of the network to detect DDoS attacks and (2) propose a solution that is effective and lightweight in terms of the resources that it uses. To accomplish these objectives, this paper examines the effect of DDoS attacks on the SDN controller and the way it can exhaust controller resources. The proposed solution to detect such attacks is based on the entropy variation of the destination IP address. Based on our experimental setup, the proposed method can detect DDoS within the first 250 packets of the attack traffic.