DoSSec: A Reputation-Based DoS Mitigation Mechanism on SDN

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks bring many challenges in software-defined networks (SDN), mainly due to the vulnerabilities present in the communication between the control and data planes. Mitigation mechanisms have been proposed to alleviate these problems with the side effect of blocking legitimate flows. This work presents a DoS attack mitigation mechanism, named DoSSec, which encompasses a flow-based reputation strategy to improve detection of spurious traffic. The results show that DoSSec is able to prioritize and preserve an average of \(95\%\) legitimate traffic compared to state-of-the-art solutions, reducing impacts caused by SYN flood DoS attacks.