Elastically Augmenting the Control-path Throughput in SDN to Deal with Internet DDoS Attacks

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been prevalent on the Internet for decades. Albeit various defenses, they keep growing in size, frequency, and duration. The new network paradigm, Software-defined networking (SDN), is also vulnerable to DDoS attacks. SDN uses logically centralized control, bringing the advantages in maintaining a global network view and simplifying programmability. When attacks happen, the control path between the switches and their associated controllers may become congested due to their limited capacity. However, the data plane visibility of SDN provides new opportunities to defend against DDoS attacks in the cloud computing environment. To this end, we conduct measurements to evaluate the throughput of the software control agents on some of the hardware switches when they are under attacks. Then, we design a new mechanism, called Scotch, to enable the network to scale up its capability and handle the DDoS attack traffic. In our design, the congestion works as an indicator to trigger the mitigation mechanism. Scotch elastically scales up the control plane capacity by using an Open vSwitch-based overlay. Scotch takes advantage of both the high control plane capacity of a large number of vSwitches and the high data plane capacity of commodity physical switches to increase the SDN network scalability and resiliency under abnormal (e.g., DDoS attacks) traffic surges. We have implemented a prototype and experimentally evaluated Scotch. Our experiments in the small-scale lab environment and large-scale GENI testbed demonstrate that Scotch can elastically scale up the control channel bandwidth upon attacks.