SDNManager: A safeguard architecture for SDN DoS attacks based on bandwidth prediction

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has quickly emerged as a promising technology for future networks and gained much attention. However, the centralized nature of SDN makes the system vulnerable to denial-of-services (DoS) attacks, especially for the currently widely deployed multicontroller system. Due to DoS attacks, SDN multicontroller model may additionally face the risk of the cascading failures of controllers. In this paper, we propose SDNManager, a lightweight and fast denial-of-service detection and mitigation system for SDN. It has five components: monitor, forecast engine, checker, updater, and storage service. It typically follows a control loop of reading flow statistics, forecasting flow bandwidth changes based on the statistics, and accordingly updating the network. It is worth noting that the forecast engine employs a novel dynamic time-series (DTS) model which greatly improves bandwidth prediction accuracy. What is more, to further optimize the defense effect, we also propose a controller dynamic scheduling strategy to ensure the global network state optimization and improve the defense efficiency. We evaluate SDNManager through a prototype implementation tested in a real SDN network environment. The results show that SDNManager is effective with adding only a minor overhead into the entire SDN/OpenFlow infrastructure.