Security in OpenFlow Enabled Cloud Environment

Abstract

Inception of flow tables as data plane abstraction, and forwarding rules that are managed by centralized controllers in emerging Software Defined Networks (SDN) has stemmed significant progress in OpenFlow based architectures. SDN is particularly fueled by data center networking and cloud computing. OpenFlow coupled with cloud solutions provide dynamic networking capabilities. With the benefits obtained from network services, security enforcement become more important and need powerful techniques for its implementation. Extensive researches in cloud security bring forward numerous methods of leveraging the SDN architecture with efficient security enforcement. The future of SDN and mobile networks is also enlightened if security models are satisfactory to cover dynamic and flexible requirements of evolving networks. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art research on security techniques in OpenFlow based cloud environments. Security is one of the main aspect of any network. A fair study and evaluation of these methods are carried out in the paper along with the security considerations in SDN and its enforcement. The security issues and recommendations for 5g network are covered briefly. This work provides an understanding of the problem, its current solution space, and anticipated future research directions.