Mynah: Enabling Lightweight Data Plane Authentication for SDN Controllers

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) has created new opportunities for both the research community and the net-working industry, but SDN also has created new challenges. One of the most fundamental SDN security issues we have observed is the absence of data plane authentication. We present a definition of this problem and a controller and switch design called Mynah that makes a first step towards addressing this problem. We then present a prototype experiment results and show that Mynah solves the issue very effectively with a trivial overhead around 4.5 percent of overall communication latency.