Software-defined networking security: pros and cons

TLDR

Software‑defined networking separates forwarding and control planes into a logically centralized architecture, promising greater agility and programmability, but early design must address security to avoid past pitfalls. This article examines the security aspects of software‑defined networking. The authors review SDN’s security advantages, how its capabilities can solve longstanding network security problems, and outline emerging threats along with potential mitigation techniques.

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that decouples the forwarding and control planes, traditionally coupled with one another, while adopting a logically centralized architecture aiming to increase network agility and programability. While many efforts are currently being made to standardize this emerging paradigm, careful attention needs to be paid to security at this early design stage too, rather than waiting until the technology becomes mature, thereby potentially avoiding previous pitfalls made when designing the Internet in the 1980s. This article focuses on the security aspects of SDN networks. We begin by discussing the new security advantages that SDN brings and by showing how some of the long-lasting issues in network security can be addressed by exploiting SDN capabilities. Then we describe the new security threats that SDN is faced with and discuss possible techniques that can be used to prevent and mitigate such threats.