Impact on SDN Powered Network Services Under Adversarial Attacks

Logically centralized nature of the controller in Software-defined Networking (SDN) makes it vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. These attacks have capabilities to degrade the performance of the managed network or bring it down in the worst case. For this reason, a large-scale deployment of SDN needs evaluation of the impact of adversarial attacks on network services. In this work, we implement various attacks in SDN and analyze their impact on the performance of web-based services running over it. Prior to that, we briefly discuss different kinds of vulnerabilities and threats in SDN. We consider the connection set-up latency and loss, for web-client requests, as metrics for the evaluation. We observe a significant degradation in the performances of web services, in terms of response time and availability, in the presence of implemented attacks.