Scalable Node-Centric Route Mutation for Defense of Large-Scale Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Exploiting software-defined networking techniques, randomly and instantly mutating routes can disguise strategically important infrastructure and protect the integrity of data networks. Route mutation has been to date formulated as NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem where feasible sets of routes need to be generated with exponential computational complexities, limiting algorithmic scalability to large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose a novel node-centric route mutation method which interprets route mutation as a signature matching problem. We formulate the route mutation problem as a three-dimensional earth mover’s distance (EMD) model and solve it by using a binary branch and bound method. Considering the scalability, we further propose that a heuristic method yields significantly lower computational complexities with marginal loss of robustness against eavesdropping. Simulation results show that our proposed methods can effectively disguise key infrastructure by reducing the difference of historically accumulative traffic among different switches. With significantly reduced complexities, our algorithms are of particular interest to safeguard large-scale networks.