FLOWGUARD: building robust firewalls for software-defined networks

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) introduces significant granularity, visibility and flexibility to networking, but at the same time brings forth new security challenges. One of the fundamental challenges is to build robust firewalls for protecting OpenFlow-based networks where network states and traffic are frequently changed. To address this challenge, we introduce FlowGuard, a comprehensive framework, to facilitate not only accurate detection but also effective resolution of firewall policy violations in dynamic OpenFlow-based networks. FlowGuard checks network flow path spaces to detect firewall policy violations when network states are updated. In addition, FlowGuard conducts automatic and real-time violation resolutions with the help of several innovative resolution strategies designed for diverse network update situations. We also implement our framework and demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed detection and resolution approaches in FlowGuard through experiments with a real-world network topology.