Software-defined networking (SDN) is a promising paradigm to improve network security protections. A lot of security enhancements through SDN have been proposed. However, current SDN-based security solutions can hardly provide sufficient protections in a real SDN network, due to several reasons: (1) they are implemented at either the centralized SDN controllers or the decentralized network devices, which are subject to a performance limitation; (2) their designs are confined by SDN network characteristics and can only provide limited security functions; (3) many solutions have deployment challenges and compatibility issues. In this paper, we propose SecControl, a practical network protection framework combining the existing security tools and SDN technologies, to produce a comprehensive network security solution in an SDN environment. By employing the capabilities of existing security tools, SecControl is able to perceive the real-time security events dynamically and adjust the protected network environment correspondingly. It can be easily extended with various methods for different security threats. With SecControl, we construct a traditional-security-tool-friendly network security solution for software-defined networks. We implement a SecControl prototype with OpenFlow and evaluate its effectiveness and performance. Our experiment shows that SecControl can cooperate with many mainstream security tools and provide effective defense responses over SDN-supported networks.
CITATION STYLE
Wang, L., & Wu, D. (2018). SecControl: Bridging the gap between security tools and SDN controllers. In Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST (Vol. 239, pp. 11–31). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78816-6_2
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