Risk-driven security metrics development for software-defined networking

Introduction of SDN (Software-Defined Networking) into the network management turns the formerly quite rigid networks to programmatically reconfigurable, dynamic and high-performing entities, which are managed remotely. At the same time, introduction of the new interfaces evidently widens the attack surface, and new kind of attack vectors are introduced threatening the QoS even critically. Thus, there is need for a security architecture, drawing from the SDN management and monitoring capabilities, and eventually covering the threats posed by the SDN evolution. For efficient security-architecture implementation, we analyze the security risks of SDN and based on that propose heuristic security objectives. Further, we decompose the objectives for effective security control implementation and security metrics definition to support informed security decision-making and continuous security improvement.