Secure Software-Defined Networking Based on Blockchain
This addresses security vulnerabilities in SDN for network administrators and users, but it appears incremental as it applies blockchain to an existing domain without fundamentally new paradigms.
The paper tackles security challenges in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), such as single-point failure and malicious flows, by designing a monolithic security mechanism based on Blockchain, which decentralizes the control plane and ensures authenticity, traceability, and accountability of application flows.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) separates the network control plane and data plane, which provides a network-wide view with centralized control (in the control plane) and programmable network configuration for data plane injected by SDN applications (in the application plane). With these features, a number of drawbacks of the traditional network architectures such as static configuration, non-scalability and low efficiency can be effectively avoided. However, SDN also brings with it some new security challenges, such as single-point failure of the control plane, malicious flows from applications, exposed network-wide resources and a vulnerable channel between the control plane and the data plane. In this paper, we design a monolithic security mechanism for SDN based on Blockchain. Our mechanism decentralizes the control plane to overcome single-point failure while maintaining a network-wide view. The mechanism also guarantees the authenticity, traceability, and accountability of application flows, and hence secures the programmable configuration. Moreover, the mechanism provides a fine-grained access control of network-wide resources and a secure controller-switch channel to further protect resources and communication in SDN.