Authentication for Resilience: The Case of SDN (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

My name is Dongting and I’m here to talk about software defined networks and their resilience. It’s joint work with Professor Ross Anderson. So what are SDNs? It’s a fairly new concept of doing networking in the past three, four years. The basic concept is we take intelligent controllers, which are basic everyday computers, PCs, and we use them to drive the switching and routing logic inside switches, using programming languages. It’s a separation of control and data plane, because the switchers and routers will just do their own stuff, and the controllers would be doing all the control plane logic. The goal of SDN is not to bring a new feature into networking, but rather to bring organisation and abstraction into networking, so you have much better manageable networks. And another goal is to cut cost because we can potentially replace large Cisco routers with a few of the cheaper switches and the general purpose PCs.