Validating User Flows to Protect Software Defined Network Environments

Software Defined Network is a promising network paradigm which has led to several security threats in SDN applications that involve user flows, switches, and controllers in the network. Threats as spoofing, tampering, information disclosure, Denial of Service, flow table overloading, and so on have been addressed by many researchers. In this paper, we present novel SDN design to solve three security threats: flow table overloading is solved by constructing a star topology-based architecture, unsupervised hashing method mitigates link spoofing attack, and fuzzy classifier combined with L1-ELM running on a neural network for isolating anomaly packets from normal packets. For effective flow migration Discrete-Time Finite-State Markov Chain model is applied. Extensive simulations using OMNeT++ demonstrate the performance of our proposed approach, which is better at preserving holding time than are other state-of-the-art works from the literature

Evaluation of machine learning techniques for intrusion detection in software defined networking

Abstract. The widespread growth of the Internet paved the way for the need of a new network architecture which was filled by Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN separated the control and data planes to overcome the challenges that came along with the rapid growth and complexity of the network architecture. However, centralizing the new architecture also introduced new security challenges and created the demand for stronger security measures. The focus is on the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which is a serious threat to the network system. There are several ways of detecting an attack and with the rapid growth of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence, the study evaluates several ML algorithms for detecting DDoS attacks on the system. Several factors have an effect on the performance of ML based IDS in SDN. Feature selection, training dataset, and implementation of the classifying models are some of the important factors. The balance between usage of resources and the performance of the implemented model is important. The model implemented in the thesis uses a dataset created from the traffic flow within the system and models being used are Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive-Bayes, Decision Tree and Logistic Regression. The accuracy of the models has been over 95% apart from Logistic Regression which has 90% accuracy. The ML based algorithm has been more accurate than the non-ML based algorithm. It learns from different features of the traffic flow to differentiate between normal traffic and attack traffic. Most of the previously implemented ML based IDS are based on public datasets. Using a dataset created from the flow of the experimental environment allows training of the model from a real-time dataset. However, the experiment only detects the traffic and does not take any action. However, these promising results can be used for further development of the model

A Cognitive Routing framework for Self-Organised Knowledge Defined Networks

This study investigates the applicability of machine learning methods to the routing protocols for achieving rapid convergence in self-organized knowledge-defined networks. The research explores the constituents of the Self-Organized Networking (SON) paradigm for 5G and beyond, aiming to design a routing protocol that complies with the SON requirements. Further, it also exploits a contemporary discipline called Knowledge-Defined Networking (KDN) to extend the routing capability by calculating the “Most Reliable” path than the shortest one. The research identifies the potential key areas and possible techniques to meet the objectives by surveying the state-of-the-art of the relevant fields, such as QoS aware routing, Hybrid SDN architectures, intelligent routing models, and service migration techniques. The design phase focuses primarily on the mathematical modelling of the routing problem and approaches the solution by optimizing at the structural level. The work contributes Stochastic Temporal Edge Normalization (STEN) technique which fuses link and node utilization for cost calculation; MRoute, a hybrid routing algorithm for SDN that leverages STEN to provide constant-time convergence; Most Reliable Route First (MRRF) that uses a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to approximate route-reliability as the metric of MRRF. Additionally, the research outcomes include a cross-platform SDN Integration framework (SDN-SIM) and a secure migration technique for containerized services in a Multi-access Edge Computing environment using Distributed Ledger Technology. The research work now eyes the development of 6G standards and its compliance with Industry-5.0 for enhancing the abilities of the present outcomes in the light of Deep Reinforcement Learning and Quantum Computing