Route Guardian： Constructing Secure Routing Paths in Software-Defined Networking

• Published in: 清华大学学报：自然科学英文版 2017, Vol.22 (4), p.400-412
• Main Authors: Mengmeng Wang, Jianwei Liu, Jian Mao, Haosu Cheng, Jie Chen, Chan Qi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dijkstra; SDN; 安全路由; 最短路径; 网络交换机; 网络安全设备; 路由机制; 软件定义
• ISSN: 1007-0214; 1878-7606

Software-Defined Networking（SDN） decouples the control plane and the data plane in network switches and routers, which enables the rapid innovation and optimization of routing and switching configurations. However,traditional routing mechanisms in SDN, based on the Dijkstra shortest path, do not take the capacity of nodes into account, which may lead to network congestion. Moreover, security resource utilization in SDN is inefficient and is not addressed by existing routing algorithms. In this paper, we propose Route Guardian, a reliable securityoriented SDN routing mechanism, which considers the capabilities of SDN switch nodes combined with a Network Security Virtualization framework. Our scheme employs the distributed network security devices effectively to ensure analysis of abnormal traffic and malicious node isolation. Furthermore, Route Guardian supports dynamic routing reconfiguration according to the latest network status. We prototyped Route Guardian and conducted theoretical analysis and performance evaluation. Our results demonstrate that this approach can effectively use the existing security devices and mechanisms in SDN.