Analysis of the Impacts of Flooding-Based DDoS Attacks on SDN-Enabled Cloud

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a promising networking paradigm that reformulates traditional architecture by altering the networking paradigm from hardware to software-based. SDN has benefits for engineers to have complete supervision of the network through the centralized controller, successful in identifying the network faults, malicious entities, etc. in an efficient way. Similarly, SDN architecture for a cloud environment provides easy cloud services and data centre management. Although SDN is beneficial in numerous ways, the architecture is vulnerable to DDoS attacks that can terminate the activities of the whole network. Authors in the literature proposed a variety of detection and mitigation techniques against DDoS attacks in SDN-enabled cloud, but most of them evaluated their results based on the features that are extracted from a dataset of traditional networks. The novel features of SDN architecture such as packet_in count and flow table entries are missing in non-SDN datasets and therefore, the experimental results based on these datasets can’t be accurate. The major contribution of this paper is to find out the features of DDoS in SDN-enabled cloud. A benchmark dataset is employed to find out the unique features of DDoS attacks and normal traffic in the SDN-enabled cloud.