Software-defined Networking (SDN) has recently developed and been put forward as a promising and encouraging solution for future internet architecture. Managed, the centralized and controlled network has become more flexible and visible using SDN. On the other hand, these advantages bring us a more vulnerable environment and dangerous threats, causing network breakdowns, systems paralysis, online banking frauds and robberies. These issues have a significantly destructive impact on organizations, companies or even economies. Accuracy, high performance and real-time systems are essential to achieve this goal successfully. Extending intelligent machine learning algorithms in a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) through a software-defined network (SDN) has attracted considerable attention in the last decade. Big data availability, the diversity of data analysis techniques, and the massive improvement in the machine learning algorithms enable the building of an effective, reliable and dependable system for detecting different types of attacks that frequently target networks. This study demonstrates the use of machine learning algorithms for traffic monitoring to detect malicious behavior in the network as part of NIDS in the SDN controller. Different classical and advanced tree-based machine learning techniques, Decision Tree, Random Forest and XGBoost are chosen to demonstrate attack detection. The NSL-KDD dataset is used for training and testing the proposed methods; it is considered a benchmarking dataset for several state-of-the-art approaches in NIDS. Several advanced preprocessing techniques are performed on the dataset in order to extract the best form of the data, which produces outstanding results compared to other systems. Using just five out of 41 features of NSL-KDD, a multi-class classification task is conducted by detecting whether there is an attack and classifying the type of attack (DDoS, PROBE, R2L, and U2R), accomplishing an accuracy of 95.95%.

Software-defined networking (SDN) has been developed to separate network control plane from forwarding plane which can decrease operational costs and the time it takes to deploy new services compared to traditional networks. Despite these advantages, this technology brings threats and vulnerabilities. Consequently, developing high-performance real-time intrusion detection systems (IDSs) to classify malicious activities is a vital part of SDN architecture. This article introduces two created datasets generated from SDN using Mininet and Ryu controller with different feature extraction tools that contain normal traffic and different types of attacks (Fin flood, UDP flood, ICMP flood, OS probe scan, port probe scan, TCP bandwidth flood, and TCP syn flood) that is used for training a number of supervised binary classification machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbor, AdaBoost, decision tree (DT), random forest, naive Bayes, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, and XGBoost. The DT algorithm has achieved high scores to fit a real-time application achieving F1 score on attack class of 0.9995, F1 score on normal class of 0.9983, and throughput score of 6,737,147.275 samples per second with a total number of three features. In addition, using data preprocessing to reduce the model complexity, thereby increasing the overall throughput to fit a real-time system.