A Security Evaluation Framework for Software-Defined Network Architectures in Data Center Environments

Abstract: The importance of cloud computing has grown over the last years, which resulted in a significant increase of Data Center (DC) network requirements. Virtualisation is one of the key drivers of that transformation and enables a massive deployment of computing resources, which exhausts server capacity limits. Furthermore, the increased network endpoints need to be handled dynamically and centrally to facilitate cloud computing functionalities. Traditional DCs barely satisfy those demands because of their inherent limitations based on the network topology. Software-Defined Networks (SDN) promise to meet the increasing network requirements for cloud applications by decoupling control functionalities from data forwarding. Although SDN solutions add more flexibility to DC networks, they also pose new vulnerabilities with a high impact due to the centralised architecture. In this paper we propose an evaluation framework for assessing the security level of SDN architectures in four different stages. Furthermore, we show in an experimental study, how the framework can be used for mapping SDN threats with associated vulnerabilities and necessary mitigations in conjunction with risk and impact classification. The proposed framework helps administrators to evaluate the network security level, to apply countermeasures for identified SDN threats, and to meet the networks security requirements.