Towards Secure SDN Policy Management

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a novel network architectural model that facilitates management of large-scale networks, enables efficient network virtualization and scalable network multi-tenancy. Centralized network controllers, an important component in the SDN paradigm, deploy on the data plane devices network policies from several independent sources, defined based on a global network view. While this approach allows to efficiently manage network connectivity and reduce the time and cost of deploying new configurations, it also increases the risk for errors -- either introduced by accident, through a combination with previous policies, or by a motivated adversary. In this position paper we review the state of the art for network policy verification for SDN deployments, identify existing challenges and outline a secure framework for network policy management in SDN deployments. Combined with existing work on cloud platform and storage security, this will contribute towards creating secure and trusted cloud deployments.