OAuthkeeper: An Authorization Framework for Software Defined Network

Implementing REST API for SDN is quite challenging compared to conventional web services. First, the state transfers in SDN are more complex among network devices, controllers, and applications. Second, SDN provides more granular resources in both the controller and the network device itself. Those challenges require SDN to have a proper REST API security definition, which is currently not available in most of the SDN controllers. In this paper, we propose and implement a REST API security module for SDN controller based on OAuth 2.0. We answer the SDN REST API security challenges by presenting novel access control parameters to cope with the granular resources introduced by SDN. Our prototype maintains the best trade-off between performance and safety by generating a maximum value of 15% overhead during our benchmark. It also offers a customizable and flexible access control for the network in various use cases.