Moving Target Defense for SDN-Based Cloud Datacenter Network Protection

The significant advance of software Defined Networking (SDN) technology has enabled several complex system operations to be highly dynamic, flexible and robust; particularly in terms of programmability and controllability with the help of SDN controllers. Accordingly, many security operations have utilized this capability to be optimally deployed in a complex network using the SDN functionalities. Moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as an adaptive and proactive defense mechanism aiming to thwart a potential attacker. The key underlying idea of MTD is to increase uncertainty and confusion for attackers by changing attack surface (i.e., system or network configurations) that can invalidate the intelligence collected by the attackers and interrupt attack execution; ultimately leading to attack failure. In this research, by leveraging the advanced SDN technology, the model of MTD using SDN-based system framework design is proposed. The model uses a runtime model that allows the proposed framework to infer the current state of the system. Based on the obtained information, the MTD mechanism using SDN can provide proactive, adaptive and affordable defense services for the exploitable aspects of the cloud datacenter network to increase uncertainty and complexityto the attackers and reduce the likelihood of an attack and minimize cloud security risk. The research also validates the outperformance of the proposed MTD technique in attack success rate via simulation on SDN-based cloud datacenter network experiments in a virtualized environment.