SDN Control Plane Security: Attacks and Mitigation Techniques

Traditional networks are complex and hard to manage due to many reasons such as manual configuration requirements of dedicated devices, lack of flexibility and a non-dynamic approach. To overcome these limitations and to meet the challenges of modern networks a new networking paradigm Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been introduced. SDN presents a centralized and completely dynamic environment which provides flexibility and programmability in networks. It enables the network to be controlled centrally and intelligently using multiple software applications. SDN being in its infancy, brings along new challenges. Standardization of various interfaces, scalability, compatibility of contrasting or divergent networks, and vulnerability issues are few of them. This paper discusses various vulnerabilities and possible attacks on every layer of an SDN and focuses on control plane attacks. Further, it presents a comprehensive survey on numerous attacks on the brain of an SDN i.e. the control plane along with existing solutions. The study concludes that despite the challenges that are worth debating, SDN has many characteristics that make it an ideal candidate for future networks.