Counteracting UDP flooding attacks in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is new networking architecture with the centralized control mechanism. SDN has been proven successful in improving not only network performance but also network security. However, the centralized control in SDN architecture incurs new security vulnerability. In particular, the UDP flooding attack can be easily launched and causes serious packet transmission delay, the performance loss on the controller and therefore the network shutdown. Hence, in this study, we consider the UDP flooding attack in SDN, propose a lightweight countermeasure, and confirm the performance and security of the proposed method via extensive experiments.