Detection and mitigation of DDOS attacks in Software Defined Networks using the Jeffrey distance

Recently, software defined networks have wide applications on the Internet in order to optimize the use of bandwidth and better traffic management. In Software Defined Network (SDN), the control plane and data plane of the networks are decoupled. In this architecture, the control plane, centrally manages switches by an special server named controller. In SDN, the controller is so vulnerable to DDOS attacks. By injecting spoofed request packets continuously, attackers make a burdensome process which cause the controller to be unreachable and thus denial of services for legitimate users. Due to the augmented impact of these attacks on the software defiend networks rather than traditional networks, need for protection of such network against the attack is very much important. In this paper we will review and simulate DDOS attacks on SDN. We afterward propose a novel detection and mitigation algorithm which takes advantage of unique features of the SDN architecture. In this algorithm, for detecting DDOS attacks in SDN a statistical method based on Jeffrey distance is used. We created the necessary infrastructure for software-driven network and evaluated the proposed method using Mininet simiulator on the Linux operating system. Our experiments performed in the simulator, showed the efficiency of the proposed method and its superiority compared to previous approaches.