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Survey on DDoS Attack Techniques and Solutions in Software-Defined Network

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Handbook of Computer Networks and Cyber Security

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) introduces an innovative idea of “programmable network”, which in turn provides flexibility and simplicity and speeds up the implementation. The core idea behind the SDN architecture is the separation of the control plane from the data plane. The data plane devices, such as switches, become simple packet forwarding devices, and the entire logic for handling the network traffic is moved into the controller which sits in the control plane. SDN adds flexibility, speeds the implementation, and simplifies management. However, this functionality of SDN also makes it as a target of one of the most popular type of attack known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

This chapter presents a concise survey of DDoS attacking techniques and solutions in SDN environment. Firstly, we present an overview of SDN and its advantages over traditional networks. Further, different vulnerabilities in SDN are being discussed along with DDoS attack. Then we present some characteristics that SDN poses to defeat this massive DDoS attack. Several taxonomies of DDoS attacks which affect the SDN environment are also discussed. Finally, we present future research directions that will be a crucial idea to defend such attacks in the near future.

The motivation behind this survey was to identify and examine various security drawbacks in the SDN architecture. We primarily focused on DDoS attack based on the recent statistics and increase of occurrence of DDoS attacks. Presenting the research challenges of this work gives us the direction to overcome the weakness that still needs to be addressed for the advancement of SDN.

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Correspondence to Ankit Kumar Jain .

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Ubale, T., Jain, A.K. (2020). Survey on DDoS Attack Techniques and Solutions in Software-Defined Network. In: Gupta, B., Perez, G., Agrawal, D., Gupta, D. (eds) Handbook of Computer Networks and Cyber Security. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22277-2_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22277-2_15

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