Security modeling and analysis of a SDN based web service

Abstract

The introduction of a Software-Defined Network (SDN) provides a better functionality and usability over the traditionally static networks. The SDN separates controllers and networking peripherals onto the Control and Data Planes respectively. However, this separation creates new vulnerabilities between the planes. To address this problem, we propose to model and analyze the security of the SDN. Further, we propose a network reconfiguration technique to assess its effectiveness of minimizing the system risk. Our simulation results show that computing the optimal reconfiguration has an exponential time complexity, and there is also a trade-off between the system risk and the server delay.