New SDN-Oriented Authentication and Access Control Mechanism

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is recognized as one of the most important future networking area. SDN architecture is a revolutionary new idea that, moving the traditional network to be software-based, provides more flexibility, high degree of automation and shorter provision time. SDN architecture dynamically separates the control plane from the data (forwarding) plane of the network, which provides centralized view of the entire network and makes it easier for managing and for monitoring the network’s resources. However, the initial design of the SDN, with its centralized point of control, does not consider sufficiently the security requirements, which makes the security issues additional challenges. In this paper we propose a new access control system for the SDN architecture, working as a controller application used to verify the identity of a host upon connection to the network. The proposed mechanism, which denies the access attempts from unauthorized hosts and defines different levels of privileges for each host, according to its authentication credentials, is implemented using a POX controller. Our approach neither needs a support of new protocols, nor requires additional configuration of hosts or routers.