Trust enhanced secure routing in SDN

Abstract

The presence of programmable entities, namely controllers and switches, in Soft ware Defined Networks (SDNs) provides a hierarchical architecture to achieve dynamic and manageable networks for easily utilizing high bandwidth communications. How ever, such architecture may cause unsubstantiated packet dropping and incorrect packet forwarding due to the inability of current networking protocols in SDN. For instance, the detection of a compromised switch, which can be used for manipulating the data plane operation, is not possible with OpenFlow. One of the potential candidates to overcome such vulnerabilities is to use an approach to reflect subjective behaviors of entities for detecting the compromised ones. The provision of computational trust based solution for evaluating subjective behaviors is expected to help determine com promised switches. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a Trust Enhanced Secure Routing (TESR) for switches to be used in secure routing. The proposed model pro vides three different trust computations in order to find the most suitable trust level for different states of a network. To show the applicability of the proposed approach, we demonstrate a set of simulations for the detection of compromised switches. Simula tion results show that TESR operates effectively to detect and eliminate compromised nodes while selecting secure paths.