A Trust Management Framework for Software Defined Networks-based Internet of Things

The proliferation of smart objects and their connectivity have contributed to the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, offering a plethora of applications and services in many sectors of our lives. There are a number of communication architectures put forth to realize commercial IoT. Among other architectures, programmable networking solves most of the network management problems through Software Defined Networks (SDN). In SDN, the control plane is separated from the data plane and hence can be a perfect choice for IoT where things have to be managed from different perspectives such as communications, resource allocation, energy consumption, and so on. Addressing the problems of traditional networks through SDN indirectly advocates for its use in IoT environments. However, the "softwarization" of the network, i.e. SDN, poses new challenges to the network security. Among other security issues, lack of trust between the SDN controller and network management application (application that controls the network behavior) is one of the key security problems in SDN that may jeopardize IoT security. To fill the gaps, in this paper, we propose a trust establishment framework for SDN. The main idea is to establish direct trust between OpenFlow SDN controller and the applications. Our results show that by using the proposed trust management framework, financial losses could be considerably reduced for the networks.