Performance evaluation of RYU controller under distributed denial of service attacks

Abstract

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been identified as one of the greatest threats to software-defined networking (SDN) because they are highly effective, hard to detect, and easy to use, and they take advantage of vulnerabilities in which the new architecture still exists. This paper describes one technique for denying the RYU controller’s services, which can cause the controller’s resources to be depleted if a significant number of packets from various zombie hosts are sent to the controller using spoofed source internet protocol (IP) addresses. In order to demonstrate the impact of the attack, we measure various metrics related to RYU controllers such as its central processing unit (CPU) usage and network throughput. In this work, Mininet was used to simulate the data plane and measure metrics such as random access memory (RAM) usage, CPU load, and link latency.