Application Layer DDoS Attack Defense Framework for Smart City using SDN

Smart city brings enormous opportunities and exciting challenges. In a smart city, operations and services such as traffic, transport, electric power, and water distribution are monitored, operated, and controlled through ICT based infrastructure, smartly. This allows efficient management of resources and facilitates smooth access to services. However, it also induces stringent requirements and challenges for uninterrupted operation and execution of ICT-based monitoring and controlled infrastructure. Cybersecurity is one of the foremost challenges in a smart city network. That is, protecting the smart city application services from cyber-attacks and ensuring continuity of services is utmost desirable. As smart city services typically comprised of web based applications, application level distributed denial of service (AL-DDoS) attack is a major cybersecurity threat that can have catastrophic impact on an extremely critical smart city network. This paper presents an efficient framework for AL-DDoS attack detection and mitigation for a smart city network. The proposed framework utilizes Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to implement resilient design that ensures continuity of smart city application services. The framework integrates a sound mechanism that distinguishes AL-DDoS attack from legitimate flash crowd. This is a novel framework that addresses the flash crowd attack detection and mitigation in a smart city environment using SDN.