Covert, Secure and Private Communications in Software Defined Networking

Covert and private communications are an essential part of modern Internet. While there have been several works on these topics, almost all of them have one or more drawbacks, which are unacceptable in modern requirements of Software Defined Networking (SDN). To this end, initially, we propose and adopt a few secure buildings blocks, such as secure bit stream match, secure longest prefix match, secure header replication, etc. On top of them we propose covert and secure end-to-end generalized forwarding protocols used in SDN over busy routers. Besides covert communications, communication privacy is a by-product of the proposed protocols. The proposed schemes are proven to be secure under the semi-honest model, outperform the related schemes in terms of security and privacy characteristics, while the experimental evaluations show their computation and communication efficiency.