Hash Flow: An Access Control Mechanism for Software Defined Network

In recent years, increasingly complex business applications, IP communications systems and cloud services all place great demands on network architectures that weren’t originally designed to handle such workloads. As networks grow in complexity, network performance problems increase as well, increasingly inadequate. Network functions virtualization (NFV) enabled the implementation of these network functions using software and general computing equipment, rather than dedicated hardware. The deployment and management of NFV are facilitated by the use of software-defined networking (SDN). Therefore, In this paper, we design a practical access control mechanism for software defined network (SDN). We first introduce the current problem of end-to-end authentication problem in SDN, and then claim that both network and routing layers protocol will require data authentication improvement. Hence, this paper proposes a hash flow tagging mechanism, which combines hash function and flow tag advantages to protect end-to-end network intrusion and achieve high security in SDN. We sketch out the changes and extensions of a SDN network controller and switches to enable high security flow data. The complete design of a SDN architecture using hash table is an exciting avenue for end-to-end authentication. The evaluation result shows the proposed architecture can achieve better protection and remain high data throughput.