Detection and Mitigation of DDoS Attacks Using Conditional Entropy in Software-defined Networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new technology that promotes network revolution. The most distinct characteristic of SDN is the transformation of control logic from the basic packet forwarding equipment to a centralized management unit called controller. However, the centralized control of the network resources is like a double-edged sword, for it not only brings beneficial features but also introduces single point of failure if the controller is under distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, we introduce a light-weight approach based on conditional entropy to improve the SDN security with an aim of defending DDoS at the early stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a high average detection rate of 99.372%.