Towards Blockchain-based Multi-controller Managed Switching for Trustworthy SDN Operation

Software Defined Networks (SDN) is the future of conventional networking. SDN enabled networks to elastically evolve with programmable components and run-time adaptive flow manipulation to best suit the network needs. Unfortunately, enabling such programmability opened the door for new classes of attacks that were never considered in conventional networks. SDN controllers are the network brain, and switches are the muscles. Unfortunately, controller and switch association occurs without any trust assurances. Such lack of assurances facilitates switch/controller identify theft and flow/role injection for malicious traffic detouring. Further controller and switch have a tightly coupled relationship where SDN switches are usually guided by only one controller. In this paper, we propose blockchains based switch/controller interaction framework to replace the conventional SDN controller memory enabling trust-worthy controller/switch association, and multiple controllers to participate in the management of the same switch set. Results showed, that the presented solution can efficiently ensure trust-worthy SDN operation.