Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has manifested both its bright and
dark sides so far. On the one hand, it has been advocated by research
communities and industry for its open nature and programmability. Every
stakeholder, such as researcher, practitioner, and developer, can design
an innovative networking service with a rich set of APIs and a global
network view by escaping from the vendor-dependent control plane. On the
other hand, its new architecture has introduced many security challenges
that did not exist in the legacy environment. However, while new attacks
and vulnerabilities within SDN have been steadily discovered, fewer
efforts have been made to systematize the vulnerabilities from security
aspects. In this paper, we aim to scrutinize prior literature that
disclosed attack cases in SDN from an architectural perspective through
identifying their root causes, penetration routes, and outcomes. Then,
we conduct an in-depth yet comprehensive discussion of their underlying
problems and introduce countermeasures proposed by researchers to
mitigate those attacks. We believe that this study can contribute to
revisiting various security problems around the current SDN architecture
and envisioning a guideline for security research for SDN in the future.