An Effective Countermeasure Method against Freeloading Attack in Software Defined Networks

In recent years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) facilitates the most of management and configuration issues for network administrators. In SDN, data plane and control plane are separated from each other and the control plane is responsible for all management functionality issues. Although, this mechanism provides effective and centralized management, it introduces some security problems which might have adversary effect on the performance of network. Freeloading is one of the most important attacks in SDN, in which a malicious user can hiddenly use the network resources. This paper explains the freeloading attack in detail and proposes an effective countermeasure for mitigating the attack. Due to the some components of the proposed method is implemented in data plane; it has low overhead and high accuracy. Simulation results confirm that the proposed method can detect and prevent the freeloading attack effectively without adverse effects on the network performance.