Vulnerability Assessment & Analysis of Software-Defined Networking using a Virtual Testbed

Software-Defined Networking is an advance and modern network architecture that is dynamic, cost-effective, manageable, and adaptable to support the nature of modern applications. Even though SDN solved many limitations and complexities available in traditional networks, the improved network architecture has also bought many new and existing security threats into account. The intruder's aim is to target the central controller, which makes this network the only point of network failure. It is essential to integrate SDN Network with Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to counter the security threats. The proposed work includes developing a virtual testbed for the simulation of the SDN network, where the OVS-switch supporting the OpenFlow protocol is connected to the network topology created using Mininet Simulator. SNORT (signature-based IDS) is integrated with the network to monitor traffic and detect security threats. The vulnerability Assessment of the designed network shows the effective detection of all the major attacks lies in broad attack categories: DoS, Probe, R2L, and U2R.