SecSDN-Cloud: Defeating Vulnerable Attacks Through Secure Software-Defined Networks

A software-defined network (SDN) is a technology that supports computer network administrators. However, the centralized control plane architecture of SDNs makes them vulnerable to harmful security threats. In this paper, we propose a secure cloud (SecSDN-cloud) architecture that includes user authentication, routing, attack resistance, and third-party monitoring. The goal of this paper is to design an SDN-cloud environment with integrated security that can resist three different attack types: flow table overloading, control plane saturation, and Byzantine attacks. A novel digital signature with chaotic secure hashing is used for user authentication, followed by an enhanced particle swarm optimization multi-class routing protocol to improve the quality of service. Controllers are assigned to switches by integrating an enhanced genetic algorithm with a modified cuckoo search algorithm. The malicious flow identification includes the analysis of five-tuples constructed from features extracted from packets. We implemented the proposed SecSDN-cloud in the OMNeT++ simulator and evaluated its performance in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay, throughput, latency, and bandwidth.