An aware-scheduling security architecture with priority-equal multi-controller for SDN

Current SDN controllers suffer from a series of potential attacks. For example, malicious flow rules may lead to system disorder by introducing unexpected flow entries. In this paper, we propose Mcad-SA, an aware decision-making security architecture with multiple controllers, which could coordinate heterogeneous controllers internally as a "big" controller. This architecture includes an additional plane, the scheduling plane, which consists of transponder, sensor, decider and scheduler. Meanwhile it achieves the functions of communicating, supervising and scheduling between data and control plane. In this framework, we adopt the vote results from the majority of controllers to determine valid flow rules distributed to switches. Besides, an aware dynamic scheduling (ADS) mechanism is devised in scheduler to intensify security of Mcad-SA further. Combined with perception, ADS takes advantage of heterogeneity and redundancy of controllers to enable the control plane operate in a dynamic, reliable and unsteady state, which results in significant difficulty of probing systems and executing attacks. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed methods indicate better security resilience over traditional architectures as they have lower failure probability when facing attacks.