A Cost-Effective MTD Approach for DDoS Attacks in Software-Defined Networks

Protecting large-scale networks, especially Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), against distributed attacks in a costeffective manner plays a prominent role in cybersecurity. One of the pervasive approaches to plug security holes and prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited is Moving Target Defense (MTD), which can be efficiently implemented in SDN as it needs comprehensive and proactive network monitoring. The critical key in MTD is to shuffle the least number of hosts with an acceptable security impact and keep the shuffling frequency low. In this paper, we have proposed an SDN-oriented Cost-effective Edge-based MTD Approach (SCEMA) to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with a lower cost by shuffling an optimized set of hosts have the highest number of connections to the critical servers. These connections are named edges from a graph-theoretical point of view. We have designed a system based on SCEMA and simulated it in Mininet. The results show that SCEMA has lower (52.58%) complexity than the previous related MTD methods with improving the security level by 14.32%.