Strategies for detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks in SDN: A survey

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm, which brings the network innovation and attracts both the industries and researchers. SDNis a programmable network model that separates the control logic from the forwarding plane. The centralize control plane takes care of all networking resources. The attackers target the SDN controller, to paralyze the logic plane that is considered as the brain of the network which provides a lot of benefits. However, due to the characteristics the control plane becomes the attractive target of security attacks for the adversaries. One of the most known threats is Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks with the goal to exhausting network resources by sending heavy traffic to them, causing network congestion. Since SDN was proposed, DDoS attack has become a popular research field in SDN security and many researchers have been presented DDoS attacks detection, prevention and mitigation solutions in SDN environment using different methods. This paper surveys the previous researches in DDoS attacks detection and mitigation based methods available in SDN environment.