AVANT-GUARD

Among the leading reference implementations of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is the OpenFlow framework, which decouples the control plane into a centralized application. In this paper, we consider two aspects of OpenFlow that pose security challenges, and we propose two solutions that could address these concerns. The first challenge is the inherent communication bottleneck that arises between the data plane and the control plane, which an adversary could exploit by mounting a "control plane saturation attack" that disrupts network operations. Indeed, even well-mined adversarial models, such as scanning or denial-of-service (DoS) activity, can produce more potent impacts on OpenFlow networks…