Balancing the detection of malicious traffic in SDN context

Abstract

Huge efforts and resources are spent every year on prevention and recovery of cyberattacks targeting users, services and network infrastructures. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a technology providing advances to the field of security with the ability of programming the network, promoting high-performance solutions and efficient resource utilization at low costs, as the use of specialized hardware is avoided. The present paper aims at exploring the SDN paradigm to develop an SDN-based framework for prevention and mitigation of malicious attacks throuhgt the network. The framework design and proposal has concerns regarding the efficient use of network and computational resources, distributing the inspection of suspicious flows by distinct Intrusion Detection Systems. For this purpose, a load-balancing strategy for traffic inspection is devised, allowing to balance both the usage of resources and the analysis of traffic flows. In this way, this paper also sheds light on the usage of OpenFlow messages to build distributed SDN-based applications with the mentioned properties.