Blockchain-Driven Enhancement of SDN Security in IoT-Related Scenarios

Abstract

The major way of contact in today's landscape of interconnected global commercial activities occurs via cloud-based networks that transcend national, geographic, and jurisdictional barriers. Software Defined Networking (SDN), a developing networking architecture meant to ease policy enforcement and dynamic network reconfiguration, enables this seamless integration. Even with all the obvious advantages brought in by SDN, the problem of larger attack surface size compared to traditional networking infrastructures cannot be considered minor, particularly within the context of safety-critical applications. This problem gets even more exacerbated if SDN has to handle networking features relevant to the IoT. In particular, such deployments are more vulnerable to certain types of attacks. Added to that is the increasing need for inter-cloud communications in IoT applications, creating a nightmare from the security point of view. Furthermore, the number of connected nodes significantly complicates the situation and creates an overwhelming barrier toward monitoring all entities to prevent system degradation and service disruption. The paper aims to provide a general overview of frequent security challenges concerning SDN and IoT cloud integration, going deeper into the basic design concepts of the newly established paradigm called Blockchain, which could be considered a critical security aspect in each SDN or IoT application. Given the peculiar features of the paper, it proposes a Blockchain implementation solution to help nullify and minimize the various security issues which come about due to the convergence of SDN and IoT.