Analysis of DDoS Attacks in Software Defined Networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a promising technology that makes the network management and application deployment easier by separating the network control logic from the forwarding hardware. It fulfills the increasing requirements of future networks, and is extensively used in telecommunications networks and data centers. Apart from the huge benefits offered by SDN, it suffers from various security attacks such as DDoS, due to its architectural characteristics. In this paper, we have analyzed the impacts of DDoS attacks on the controller, data plane switches, and communication channel by measuring the CPU utilization, memory utilization, bandwidth usage, and number of flow table entries. The experiments are performed in both Mininet emulation tool and physical testbed. The results show that the attacker can exhaust the resources of the SD N infrastructure in short time with the limited resources.