Securing SDN Southbound and Data Plane Communication with IBC

Abstract

In software-defined network (SDN), the southbound protocol defines the communication between the control plane and the data plane. The agreed protocol, OpenFlow, suggests securing the southbound communication with Transport Layer Security (TLS). However, most current SDN projects do not implement the security segment, with only a few exceptions such as OpenDayLight, HP VAN SDN, and ONOS implementing TLS in the southbound communication. From the telecommunication providers’ perspective, one of the major SDN consumers besides data centers, the data plane becomes much more complicated with the addition of wireless data plane as it involves numerous wireless technologies. Therefore, the complicated resource management along with the security of such a data plane can hinder the migration to SDN. In this paper, we propose securing the distributed SDN communication with a multidomain capable Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) protocol, particularly for the southbound and wireless data plane communication. We also analyze the TLS-secured Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) message exchanges to find out the possible bandwidth saved with IBC.