Interactive analysis of SDN-driven defence against distributed denial of service attacks

The Secure Autonomous Response Networks (SARNET) framework introduces a mechanism to respond autonomously to security attacks in Software Defined Networks (SDN). Still the range of responses possible and their effectiveness need to be properly evaluated such that the decision making process and the self-learning capability of such systems are optimized. To this purpose we developed a touch-table driven interactive SARNET prototype, named VNET, and we demonstrated its use through real-time monitoring and control of real and virtualised networks. By observing users interacting with the system at SC15 in Austin, we concluded that in a SDN it is possible to achieve high effectiveness of responses by carefully choosing a relatively minor number of actions.