Building stateful firewall over software defined networking

Abstract

Current network architectures are ill suited to meet today’s enterprise and academic requirements. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new way to Design, Build and Operate Networks. It replaces static, inflexible and complex networks with networks that are agile, scalable and innovative. The main idea is to decouple the control and data planes, allowing the network to be programmatically controlled. A key element of SDN architectures is the controller. This logically centralized entity acts as a network operating system, providing applications with a uniform and centralized programming interface to the underlying network. But it also introduces new security challenges. The challenge of building robust firewalls is the main challenge for protection of OpenFlow networks. The main problem with traditional firewall is that Network Administrator cannot modify/extend the capabilities of traditional vendor-specific firewall. Network Administrator can only configure the firewall according to the specifications given by the firewall vendor. To solve these problems we developed stateful firewall application that runs over SDN controller to show that most of the firewall functionalities can be built on software, without the aid of a dedicated hardware.