Early Detection of DDoS Attacks against SDN Controllers

A Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new network architecture that 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. To mitigate this threat, this paper proposes to use the central control of SDN for attack detection and introduces a solution that is effective and lightweight in terms of the resources that it uses. More precisely, this paper shows how DDoS attacks can exhaust controller resources and provides a solution to detect such attacks based on the entropy variation of the destination IP address. This method is able to detect DDoS within the first five hundred packets of the attack traffic.