New Detection Mechanism for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Software Defined Networks

Software defined networks (SDN) are a recently developed form for controlling network management by providing centralized control unit called the Controller. This master Controller is a great power point but at the same time it is unfortunately a failure point and a serious loophole if it is targeted and dropped by attacks. One of the most serious types of attacks is the inability to access the Controller, which is known as the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This research shows how DDoS attack can deplete the resources of the Controller and proposes a lightweight mechanism, which works at the Controller and detects a DDoS attack in the early stages. The proposed mechanism can not only detect the attack, but also identify attack paths and initiate a mitigation process to provide some degree of protection to network devices immediately after the attack is detected. The proposed mechanism depends on a hybrid technique that merges between the average flow initiation rate, and the flow specification of the coming traffic to the network.