Leveraging SDN for collaborative DDoS mitigation

In this paper we propose a collaborative distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack mitigation scheme using SDN. We design a secure controller-to-controller (C-to-C) protocol that allows SDN-controllers lying in different autonomous systems (AS) to securely communicate and transfer attack information with each other. This enables efficient notification along the path of an ongoing attack and effective filtering of traffic near the source of attack, thus saving valuable time and network resources. We developed and deployed a prototype of the proposed scheme in our lab to evaluate the performance and efficiency. Based on the experimental results we showed that our SDN based collaborative scheme is capable of efficiently mitigating DDoS attacks in real time with very small computational footprints.