Securing Distributed SDN Controllers Against DoS Attacks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an agile and flexible computer network architecture that allows a quick and efficient response by the network administrator to any changes. A Distributed SDN Controllers architecture is more effective and scalable with higher availability. This paper proposes a distributed controller approach to detect Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in SDN network and recover attacked controller. To address DoS attacks efficiently, the approach proposes a protocol with several components including a mapping algorithm, heart-beat messages, synchronization messages, take-over process, and protective mode. Besides the DoS attack, the proposed approach addresses several concerns that come with it. The proposed approach has been applied and tested on mininet simulator.