A Framework for SDN Forensic Readiness and Cybersecurity Incident Response

SDN represents a significant advance for the telecom world, since the decoupling of the control and data planes offers numerous advantages in terms of management dynamism and programmability, mainly due to its software-based centralized control. Unfortunately, these features can be exploited by malicious entities, who take advantage of the centralized control to extend the scope and consequences of their attacks. When this happens, both the legal and network technical fields are concerned with gathering information that will lead them to the root cause of the problem. Although forensics and incident response processes share their interest in the event information, both operate in isolation due to the conceptual and pragmatic challenges of integrating them into SDN environments, which impacts on the resources and time required for information analysis. Given these limitations, the current work focuses on proposing a framework for SDNs that combines the above approaches to optimize the resources to deliver evidence, incorporate incident response activation mechanisms, and generate assumptions about the possible origin of the security problem.