OSCO: An open security-enhanced compatible openflow platform

Abstract

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a representative next generation network architecture, which allows network administrators to programmatically initialize, control, change and manage network behavior dynamically via open interfaces. However, SDN brings new security problems, e.g., controller hijacking, black-hole, unauthorized data modification, etc. It is desirable to develop a unified platfom to enhance the security property and facilitate the security configuration and evaluation. In this paper, we propose OSCO (Open Security-enhanced Compatible OpenFlow) platform, a platform based on Raspberry Pi Single Board Computer (SBC) hardware and SDN network architecture, which supports highly configurable cryptographic algorithm modules, security protocols, flexible hardware extensions and virtualized SDN networks. Furthermore, we present an enhanced OpenFlow protocol to improve the security in SDN data plane. We implement and evaluate the prototype system and the experiment results show that our system conducted security functions with relatively low computational and networking performance overheads.