Security & privacy in software defined networks, issues, challenges and cost of developed solutions: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Due to fast development in digital systems, the traditional network architecture is becoming inadequate for the requirements of new technologies such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Bring Your Own Device and for the expansion of internet services. These technologies and services need large-scale computing, high resource availability, dynamic infrastructure tailoring, automation, resilience, holistic knowledge and other needs, still network design demonstrated unmanageable in term of flexible network deployment, dynamic system configuration, agile system estimation, and adaptable system sending. Because of unaltered design of legacy network for recent decades and dynamic nature of modern applications, Software Defined Networks (SDN) has imagined as rising methodology giving programmability, traffic management and adaptive configuration. As SDN architecture gives intelligible centralization and agility to respond to changing demands it additionally presents new attacks conceivable threats and potential security dangers to make it vulnerable and even compromised. Still, on the other side, SDN faces many security challenges, many kinds of new security issues introduced with the advent of SDN. Therefore, an efficient literature review is carried out to collect the issues that most state of the art in SDN security. Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a collection of 69 well-known papers that are published from 2014–2020. SLR's objective is to study SDN threats, its causes, target planes, cost of developed solutions, and challenges that are related to security. This SLR proposed the layered solution under consideration of advances and threats of technology, in which each layer finds the varying security attacks, its causes, and their proposed solutions. Moreover, to facilitate the future direction related to the security of SDN and privacy, some open problems and challenges are presented. This study will provide a new horizon for future research on SDN security.