Distributed denial of service attacks in software-defined networking with cloud computing

Abstract

Although software-defined networking (SDN) brings numerous benefits by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, there is a contradictory relationship between SDN and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. On one hand, the capabilities of SDN make it easy to detect and to react to DDoS attacks. On the other hand, the separation of the control plane from the data plane of SDN introduces new attacks. Consequently, SDN itself may be a target of DDoS attacks. In this paper, we first discuss the new trends and characteristics of DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments. We show that SDN brings us a new chance to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments, and we summarize good features of SDN in defeating DDoS attacks. Then we review the studies about launching DDoS attacks on SDN and the methods against DDoS attacks in SDN. In addition, we discuss a number of challenges that need to be addressed to mitigate DDoS attached in SDN with cloud computing. This work can help understand how to make full use of SDN's advantages to defeat DDoS attacks in cloud computing environments and how to prevent SDN itself from becoming a victim of DDoS attacks.