DDoS Vulnerabilities Analysis in SDN Controllers: Understanding the Attacking Strategies

Modern technologies like 5G, IoT, and Cloud Computing are all adopting Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as a standard approach. The reason behind its widespread acceptance is its innovative design principle of decoupling the network's control logic from its data-forwarding hardware. SDN controller is the core of the network which manages the network traffic flows therefore the most important task in SDN is to provide security to the controller. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are types of attacks that slow down the performance of SDN where malicious users send a large volume of fake packets to the controller in an attempt to use up all of its resources. In this study, we analyze the vulnerability of DDoS attacks in different SDN controllers like POX, Ryu, Floodlight, and OpenDayLight through a comprehensive experimental study. From this study, it has been observed that said controllers are affected differently in terms of the CPU and memory utilization due to their routing policies. This study will help a network administrator to choose the right solution against DDoS attacks in SDN controllers.