A Novel Impact Analysis Approach for SDN-based Networks

Risk assessment comprises a series of processes for evaluating the extent to which a system is threatened by cyber-attacks. One important aspect of risk assessment is to determine the magnitude of impact of cyber-attacks. In this paper we propose a novel impact analysis approach which adopts both qualitative and quantitative elements for determining the impact value. As use case, we consider a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based communication system and three types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, namely ICMP Flood, UDP Flood, and TCP Syn Flood attacks. By applying the impact analysis approach, we are able to calculate the impact of the aforementioned DDoS attack types on each network component and identify the most impacted component. We are also able to calculate the impact on the whole SDN network and thus, to figure out the most severe DDoS attack type.