DDoS Attacks on Software Defined Network: Challenges and Issues

The expansion of networks, the emergence of new technologies and the proliferation of state-of-art telecommunication devices for over two decades increased the security threats. Since then, many solutions have been proposed for secure internet architecture among them, software defined network (SDN) has gained popularity due to its robust and secure architecture based on the centralized controller that lies on the control plane and is responsible for dynamic network management, analysis and control which is not possible in legacy networks. However, the security of a network is still a hot research challenge, especially the most critical threat is distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Somehow SDN addresses the security issues of traditional IP-based networks. However, SDN itself can be at great risk due to centralized controllers that turn down the network performance if not protected efficiently. Moreover, deployment of SDN architecture is a big challenge due to the lack of experts and necessary hardware. This paper highlights the limitations and challenges of SDN architecture deployment in the context of DDoS attacks.