An SDN-Based Wireless Authentication and Access Control Security Solution

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new approach in network management that proposes to separate the network control (Control plane) and the forwarding process (Data plane) to optimize the network infrastructure and improve network performance, controllability, manageability and flexibility. However, like every emerging technology, SDN has brought its own new challenges in terms of security. The security of SDN is the premise of its large-scale deployment and implementation. In this paper, we propose a wireless authentication and access control security framework under the SDN architecture which provides an optimal and secure network access with low latency. Considering the ability of SDN to handle authentication and access control in a wireless environment, we installed wireless authentication modules into the Ryu controller. Meanwhile, we added the concept of management unit to the RBAC model to achieve hierarchical authorization in the wireless authentication environment. We have implemented and tested our architecture to show its performance.