Improved Handshaking Procedures for Transport Layer Security in Software Defined Networks

Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a new technology to enhance the flexibility, resilience, and automated centralized management of a network. Recently several reports have identified possible vulnerabilities, which may affect its authenticity, availability, confidentiality and integrity. This paper analyzes several types of security issues in SDNs, especially on how to secure the communication between the control plane and the data plane. The state-of-the-art security protocol TLS in SDNs has been verified using the Scyther Tool. Two security schemes, namely TLSHPS and TLSIHP are proposed to improve the handshaking procedures of the TLS. Security analysis with the Scyther tool shows that both proposed schemes work well to prevent various cyber attacks.