DDOS Attack Detection and Mitigation using SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach for the design and management of computer networks. The main concept behind SDN is the separation of the network’s control and forwarding planes with the control plane moved to the centralized controller. In SDN networks with the centralized controller structure DDoS attacks can easily exhaust the computing and communication resources, thus, breaks down the network within a short time. Since SDN networks are used mainly in large data centres with many switches, it is critical to also find the targeted parts of the network through the detection process. This will reduce the time required to carry out a mitigation measure. Controllers are usually designed with backups and also are very powerful devices with huge amounts of memory but the resources in the switches are much more limited. This makes the switches to be more susceptible against these types of attacks and hence it is very important to have quick provisional methods in place to prevent the switches from breaking down as soon as the first signs of an attack are detected. It is also very important to design the detection method as lightweight as possible to prevent putting any extra load on the controller.