Moving Target Defense Application and Analysis in Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) dissociates the control plane from the data plane, creating a central point facilitating managed services and network virtualization. SDN allows flexibility by dynamic programmability features. On the other hand, Moving Target Defense (MTD) increases complexity in the network to prevent or delay attacks by continuously creating and adapting to the dynamic environment. In this paper, we implement a Moving Target Defense technique in Software-Defined Networking and analyze the TCP and UDP traffic generated in the network. MTD implementation in SDN has been well studied, but there is little work to analyze and evaluate the impact of this dynamic environment on SDN performance. The network's dynamic nature creates considerable overhead on the controller, resulting in poor performance, latency, jitter, and packet loss. This paper analyzes MTD traffic implemented in a software-defined network and compares the results with the traditional (without MTD) software-defined network topology.