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Exploring the Security of Software Defined Network Controllers

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Informatics and Intelligent Applications (ICIIA 2021)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1547))

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Abstract

Computer networking is actively moving towards intelligent management of corporate networks. AI plays a more and more significant role in corporate traffic management on Software Defined Networks. The centralized nature of the SDN management gives potential attackers great chances to compromise it and subsequently jeopardize the whole network security. The SDN controller is the center point for connections between the applications and the network, becomes the potential candidate for network attacks such as man-in-the-middle or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, the SDN infrastructure was exposed to various DDoS attacks and then the results of the attack were analyzed to outline the potential severity of the attacks. In a nutshell, this paper studies the potential security vulnerabilities of unencrypted communication in the northbound and southbound channels of SDNs. It was indicated that even most-recommended security mechanisms such as VLAN traffic segregation may not protect SDN controllers from being impacted by the attack happening in a different VLAN on the same private cloud platform.

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Correspondence to Sergey Butakov .

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Kaur, P., Patel, S., Mittal, S., Sharma, S., Butakov, S. (2022). Exploring the Security of Software Defined Network Controllers. In: Misra, S., Oluranti, J., Damaševičius, R., Maskeliunas, R. (eds) Informatics and Intelligent Applications. ICIIA 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1547. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95630-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95630-1_12

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