Nowadays, it is common for applications to require servers to run constantly and aim as close as possible to zero downtime. The slightest failure might cause significant financial losses and sometimes even lives. For this reason, security and management measures against network threats are fundamental and have been researched for years. Software-defined networks (SDN) are an advancement in network management due to their centralization of the control plane, as it facilitates equipment setup and administration over the local network. However, this centralization makes the controller a target to denial of service attacks (DoS). In this study, we aim to develop a network anomaly detection and mitigation system that uses gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural networks combined with fuzzy logic. The neural network is trained to forecast future traffic, and anomalies are detected when the forecasting fails. The system is designed to operate in software-defined networks since they provide network flow information and tools to manage forwarding tables. We also demonstrate how the neural network’s hyperparameters affect the detection module. The system was tested using two datasets: one with emulated traffic generated by the data communication and networking research group called Orion, from computer science department at state university of Londrina, and CICDDoS2019, a well-known dataset by the anomaly detection community. The results show that GRU networks combined with fuzzy logic are a viable option to detect anomalies in SDN and possibly in other anomaly detection applications. The system was compared with other deep learning techniques.

Over the last few years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has become an emerging architecture to design future networks and to meet new application demands. SDN provides resources for improving network control and management by separating control and data plane, and the logical control is centralized in a controller. However, the centralized control logic can be an ideal target for malicious attacks, mainly Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Recently, Deep Learning has become a powerful technique applied in cybersecurity, and many Network Intrusion Detection (NIDS) have been proposed in recent researches. Some studies have indicated that deep neural networks are sensitive in detecting adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks are instances with certain perturbations that cause deep neural networks to misclassify. In this paper, we proposed a detection and defense system based on Adversarial training in SDN , which uses Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework for detecting DDoS attacks and applies adversarial training to make the system less sensitive to adversarial attacks. The proposed system includes well-defined modules that enable continuous traffic monitoring using IP flow analysis, enabling the anomaly detection system to act in near-real-time. We conducted the experiments on two distinct scenarios, with emulated data and the public dataset CICDDoS 2019. Experimental results demonstrated that the system efficiently detected up-to-date common types of DDoS attacks compared to other approaches.

Computer networks become complex and dynamic structures. As a result of this fact, the configuration and the managing of this whole structure is a challenging activity. Software-Defined Networks(SDN) is a new network paradigm that, through an abstraction of network plans, seeks to separate the control plane and data plane, and tends as an objective to overcome the limitations in terms of network infrastructure configuration. As in the traditional network environment, the SDN environment is also liable to security vulnerabilities. This work presents a system of detection and mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and Portscan attacks in SDN environments (LSTM-FUZZY). The LSTM-FUZZY system presented in this work has three distinct phases: characterization, anomaly detection, and mitigation. The system was tested in two scenarios. In the first scenario, we applied IP flows collected from the SDN Floodlight controllers through emulation on Mininet. On the other hand, in the second scenario, the CICDDoS 2019 dataset was applied. The results gained show that the efficiency of the system to assist in network management, detect and mitigate the occurrence of the attacks.

With the ever-growing data traffic in computer networks nowadays, the management of large-scale networks is a challenge for guaranteeing the quality of the provided services. This is due to the increasingly usage of connected applications, such as Internet of Things and cloud computing environments. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new paradigm that aims to make this management process easier by centralizing the configuration of all network devices into a single programmable central controller. However, as any centralized service, this architecture is susceptible to security vulnerabilities, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) and port scan attacks. Thus, security methods are necessary to guarantee the normal operation of SDN's central controller. Furthermore, networks are transporting an increasingly amount of information day by day, which could mean data loss in case of long network unavailability. For this reason, security mechanisms must operate online, with fast-responding countermeasures to mitigate the impact of the detected attacks over the SDN. In this paper, we present a fast SDN defense system against DDoS and port scan attacks, which runs directly into the central controller and uses a game theoretical approach for attack mitigation. For the detection, we compare three different approaches, particle swarm optimization, multi-layer perceptron neural network, and discrete wavelet transform. We test our approach over IP flow data generated over Mininet network emulator, along with floodlight controller, and the presented defense system achieved good outcomes for both detection and mitigation processes.