The application of Software Defined Networking on securing computer networks: A survey

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a new networking paradigm for managing different kinds of networks ranging from enterprise to home network through software enabled control. The logically centralized control plane and programmability offers a great opportunity to improve network security, like implementing new mechanisms to detect and mitigate various threats, as well as enables deploying security as a service on the SDN controller. Due to the increasing and fast development of SDN, this paper provides an extensive survey on the application of SDN on enhancing the security of computer networks. In particular, we survey recent research studies that focus on applying SDN for network security including attack detection and mitigation, traffic monitoring and engineering, configuration and policy management, service chaining, and middlebox deployment, in addition to smart grid security. We further identify some challenges and promising future directions on SDN security, compatibility and scalability issues that should be addressed in this field.