Mitigating DDoS Attacks in SDN-Based IoT Networks Leveraging Secure Control and Data Plane Algorithm

• Main Authors: Song Wang, Karina Gomez, Kandeepan Sithamparanathan, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Giovanni Russello, Paul Zanna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: DDoS; SDN; IoT; OpenFlow; Zodiac; Security
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/3/929

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT) are the trends of network evolution. SDN mainly focuses on the upper level control and management of networks, while IoT aims to bring devices together to enable sharing and monitoring of real-time behaviours through network connectivity. On the one hand, IoT enables us to gather status of devices and networks and to control them remotely. On the other hand, the rapidly growing number of devices challenges the management at the access and backbone layer and raises security concerns of network attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The combination of SDN and IoT leads to a promising approach that could alleviate the management issue. Indeed, the flexibility and programmability of SDN could help in simplifying the network setup. However, there is a need to make a security enhancement in the SDN-based IoT network for mitigating attacks involving IoT devices. In this article, we discuss and analyse state-of-the-art DDoS attacks under SDN-based IoT scenarios. Furthermore, we verify our SDN sEcure COntrol and Data plane (SECOD) algorithm to resist DDoS attacks on the real SDN-based IoT testbed. Our results demonstrate that DDoS attacks in the SDN-based IoT network are easier to detect than in the traditional network due to IoT traffic predictability. We observed that random traffic (UDP or TCP) is more affected during DDoS attacks. Our results also show that the probability of a controller becoming halt is 10%, while the probability of a switch getting unresponsive is 40%.