DDoS and Cyber Attacks Detection and Mitigation in SDN: A Comprehensive Research of Moving Target Defense Systems

Software defined network (SDN) is an evolving networking technology. SDN supports high scalability and efficiency for end users. The involvement more devices or users to the SDN controller, security during data sharing is lacking. Especially, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attackers target SDN controller and switches for the aim of exhaust the resources of them. To address those issues, authors in the current works have established various solutions such as firewall, machine learning and deep learning approaches to block the request from DDoS attackers and also addressed the issue of resource consumption and scalability. A Moving Target Defense (MTD) mechanism is one of the approaches for DDoS attacks detection and mitigation. MTD provides fault tolerance and security features. Different MTD schemes proposed such as Proxy Server assisted MTD, Flow Filtering MTD, and Manager aided MTD. Existing MTD suffers by many issues such as single point of failure, lack of traffic information, communication overhead. Theoretical analysis of various MTD mechanisms is taken into account for comparison. Among the several MTD, joint defense (proactive and reactive) aided MTD gives the better scalability, flexibility and adaptation. It is better under multi-controller SDN environment.