Enhancing Network Security through Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that attracts significant attention from both industry and academia recently. By decoupling the control logic from the closed and proprietary implementations of traditional network devices, it enables researchers and practitioners to design new innovative network functions/protocols in a much more flexible, powerful, and easier way. We believe SDN provides new research opportunities to security, and it can greatly impact network security research in many different ways. However, till today, SDN has not been well recognized by the security community yet. In this systematic survey on SDN security, we investigate how the new features provided by SDN can help enhance network security and information security process. By systematically reasoning the opportunities introduced by SDN to network security, we hope to provide new insights for future research in this important area.