Towards a Richer Set of Services in Software-Defined Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has drawn increasing attention from both industry and academia, owing to its premise to simplify the management and control over large networks. While the SDN technology was initially deployed within datacenters, there are currently early deployments of SDN in Wide-Area Networks; SDN is further envisioned to be deployed in the near future within fixed and mobile networks. In this paper, we show that the envisioned deployment of SDN within operator networks opens the doors to novel network security services that the operators can efficiently offer. More specifically, we propose in this work two exemplary operator services; our first solution enables the construction of secure location proofs for registered network users. Our second solution offers users the possibility to request the setup of network paths that are tailored to their specific security constraints, e.g., that only cross domains regulated by appropriate legislations which match their security policies. We show that this can be securely and efficiently attained by leveraging basic functionality from the OpenFlow protocol. In this respect, we evaluate the feasibility of our proposals by means of implementation within a realistic testbed composed of hardware OpenFlow-enabled switches; our findings suggest that our proposals can be deployed with minimal overhead within existing SDN-enabled networks.