A survey on OpenFlow-based Software Defined Networks: Security challenges and countermeasures

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been proposed as an emerging network architecture, which consists of decoupling the control planes and data planes of a network. Due to its openness and standardization, SDN enables researchers to design and implement new innovative network functions and protocols in a much easier and flexible way. In particular, OpenFlow is currently the most deployed SDN concept, which provides communication between the controller and the switches. However, the dynamism of programmable networks also brings potential new security challenges relating to various attacks such as scanning, spoofing attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and so on. In this survey, we aim to give particular attention to OpenFlow-based SDN and present an up-to-date view to existing security challenges and countermeasures in the literature. This effort attempts to simulate more research attention to these issues in future OpenFlow and& SDN development. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.