Game-Based Defending against Attacks in Software Defined Networks with Routing Control

This paper aims at defending the data traffic against an attack in Software Defined Networks (SDNs) by leveraging the flexibility to collect traffic information and control traffic routing in SDN. We first model the interaction between an attacker and a defender as a two-player variable sum game model, and analyze the Nash equilibrium of the proposed game model. By further analyzing the Nash equilibrium, we propose some guidelines to control the traffic routing which can help enhance the traffic security under attacking. Based on these guidelines, we design an online algorithm and an offline algorithm to control the traffic routing. By applying our algorithms to the scenario that the attacker intends to destroy a node to break the traffic, our algorithms can greatly reduce the traffic loss when the network is under attacking.