Establishing and Maintaining Multivariate Trust in a Hierarchical SDN

Traditional network architectures suffer from an inability to depart from the marriage between the control and data planes housed in the same physical device. Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides such a departure: an architecture that can rapidly integrate diverse and dynamic network functions. Current network architectures trust traffic typically based on IP address and the physical location of the host. This paper defines and outlines a multivariate trust model in an SDN environment that provides a method to implement the policies of a complex organization. An entity's trust level, based on hardware trusted platform modules, operating system status, user identification, and traffic patterns, is used to determine whether its particular traffic flow is allowed to traverse the network. Ultimately, we allocate a dynamic network slicing solution to such flows, enabling the efficient allocation of bandwidth across a layered SDN. We are deploying this trust model on a three-tiered network model designed to simulate the hierarchical nature of the US Army and the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN) through common traffic scenarios.