Security Analysis of Dynamic SDN Architectures Based on Game Theory

Abstract

Security evaluation of SDN architectures is of critical importance to develop robust systems and address attacks. Focused on a novel-proposed dynamic SDN framework, a game-Theoretic model is presented to analyze its security performance. This model can represent several kinds of players' information, simulate approximate attack scenarios, and quantitatively estimate systems' reliability. And we explore several typical game instances defined by system's capability, players' objects, and strategies. Experimental results illustrate that the system's detection capability is not a decisive element to security enhancement as introduction of dynamism and redundancy into SDN can significantly improve security gain and compensate for its detection weakness. Moreover, we observe a range of common strategic actions across environmental conditions. And analysis reveals diverse defense mechanisms adopted in dynamic systems have different effect on security improvement. Besides, the existence of equilibrium in particular situations further proves the novel structure's feasibility, flexibility, and its persistent ability against long-Term attacks.