Design and Analysis of Anomaly Detection and Mitigation Schemes for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Software Defined Network. An Investigation into the Security Vulnerabilities of Software Defined Network and the Design of Efficient Detection and Mitigation Techniques for DDoS Attack using Machine Learning Techniques

Software Defined Networks (SDN) has created great potential and hope to overcome the need for secure, reliable and well managed next generation networks to drive effective service delivery on the go and meet the demand for high data rate and seamless connectivity expected by users. Thus, it is a network technology that is set to enhance our day-to-day activities. As network usage and reliance on computer technology are increasing and popular, users with bad intentions exploit the inherent weakness of this technology to render targeted services unavailable to legitimate users. Among the security weaknesses of SDN is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Even though DDoS attack strategy is known, the number of successful DDoS attacks launched has seen an increment at an alarming rate over the last decade. Existing detection mechanisms depend on signatures of known attacks which has not been successful in detecting unknown or different shades of DDoS attacks. Therefore, a novel detection mechanism that relies on deviation from confidence interval obtained from the normal distribution of throughput polled without attack from the server. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis to determine which of the network metrics (jitter, throughput and response time) is more sensitive to attack by introducing white Gaussian noise and evaluating the local sensitivity using feed-forward artificial neural network is evaluated. All metrics are sensitive in detecting DDoS attacks. However, jitter appears to be the most sensitive to attack. As a result, the developed framework provides an avenue to make the SDN technology more robust and secure to DDoS attacks

Design and Analysis of Anomaly Detection and Mitigation Schemes for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Software Defined Network. An Investigation into the Security Vulnerabilities of Software Defined Network and the Design of Efficient Detection and Mitigation Techniques for DDoS Attack using Machine Learning Techniques

Software Defined Networks (SDN) has created great potential and hope to overcome the need for secure, reliable and well managed next generation networks to drive effective service delivery on the go and meet the demand for high data rate and seamless connectivity expected by users. Thus, it is a network technology that is set to enhance our day-to-day activities. As network usage and reliance on computer technology are increasing and popular, users with bad intentions exploit the inherent weakness of this technology to render targeted services unavailable to legitimate users. Among the security weaknesses of SDN is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Even though DDoS attack strategy is known, the number of successful DDoS attacks launched has seen an increment at an alarming rate over the last decade. Existing detection mechanisms depend on signatures of known attacks which has not been successful in detecting unknown or different shades of DDoS attacks. Therefore, a novel detection mechanism that relies on deviation from confidence interval obtained from the normal distribution of throughput polled without attack from the server. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis to determine which of the network metrics (jitter, throughput and response time) is more sensitive to attack by introducing white Gaussian noise and evaluating the local sensitivity using feed-forward artificial neural network is evaluated. All metrics are sensitive in detecting DDoS attacks. However, jitter appears to be the most sensitive to attack. As a result, the developed framework provides an avenue to make the SDN technology more robust and secure to DDoS attacks

A Deductive Approach for the Sensitivity Analysis of Software Defined Network Parameters

With the exponential growth in the number of internet-enabled devices, large scale security threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks significantly affect software defined networks (SDNs). This necessitates efficient detection and mitigation solutions. Monitoring of SDN activities (typically identified using metrics such as throughput, jitter and response time) to ascertain deviations from profiles of normality (previously learned from benign traffic) is a key approach in detecting attacks on SDNs. In this paper, local sensitivity analysis (LSA) is implemented to identify the key network metrics that mainly influence the prediction of whether an SDN is under attack or secure. Using throughput, jitter and response time as the network impact metrics and a mathematical cost function based on min-max feature scaling to associate SDN scenarios with their respective SDN impact metrics, an artificial neural network (ANN)-based prediction model is built. The sensitivity of throughput, jitter and response time is then evaluated using the deviations of newly predicted target values of the ANN model from the actual target values when an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is added to the respective impact metrics. The results of this study show that throughput, jitter and response time are all statistically sensitive to a DDoS flooding attack of the SDN. Also, Jitter was found to be the most sensitive network metric to a DDoS flooding attack of the SDN