AC-PROT: An Access Control Model to Improve Software-Defined Networking Security

The logically-centralized controllers have largely operated as the coordination points in software-defined networking(SDN), through which applications submit network operations to manage the global network resource. Therefore, the validity of these network operations from SDN applications are critical for the security of SDN. In this paper, we analyze the mechanism that generates network operations in SDN, and present a fine-grained access control model, called Access Control Protector(AC-PROT),that employs an attribute-based signature scheme for network applications. The simulation result demonstrates that AC-PROT can efficiently identify and reject unauthorized network operations generated by applications.