Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of DoS Attacks in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a simpler and more efficient approach to manage computer networks. This is achieved by decoupling the control functionality from the forwarding elements, and placing it into a logically centralised controller. This centralised architecture makes SDN susceptible to a range of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In this paper we investigate a range of DoS attacks against OpenFlow-based SDN, both against the control plane and data plane, and quantify the impact of the attacks via experiments. In particular, we compare the impact on three key SDN controller platforms, i.e. ONOS, Floodlight and Ryu. Our results show that with relatively limited resources, an attacker can cause a significant disruption against an SDN.