SDNDefender: A Comprehensive DDoS Defense Mechanism Using Hybrid Approaches over Software Defined Networking

Abstract

In traditional networks, DDoS attacks are often launched in the network layer or the transport layer. Researchers had explored this problem in depth and put forward plenty of solutions. However, these solutions are only suitable for scenarios such as a single link or victim side network and could not analyse traffic distribution from the angle of the global network. Also, the TCP/IP network architecture lacks abilities to quickly conduct resource deployment and traffic scheduling. When DDoS attacks occur, victims usually could not respond in time. With the superiorities of centralized control mode and global topological view, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides a new way to get over the above issues. In this paper, we adopt a combination of diverse technologies to design SDNDefender, a SDN-based DDoS detection and defense mechanism, which is composed of two core components aiming to counter the most popular DDoS attacks including IP spoofing attack and TCP SYN flood attack. We carry out quantitative simulation experiments for evaluating SDNDefender from many metrics. The experimental results show that in contrast to other DDoS defense algorithms, SDNDefender not only efficiently validates spoofed packets and withstands well-known attacks but also defends unknown attacks according to the target’s available resources. Besides, SDNDefender could significantly reduce TCP half-open connections and improve detection accuracy, alleviating attack influences that exhaust the server’s resources and network bandwidth.