Enhancing east-west interface security in heterogeneous SDN via blockchain
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Software defined networking (SDN) increasingly integrates multiple controllers from diverse vendors to enhance network scalability, flexibility, and reliability. However, such heterogeneous deployments pose significant security threats, especially at the east-west interface which is connecting these controllers. Existing solutions are inadequate for ensuring robust protection across multi-vendor SDN environments as most of them are meant to a specific type of attacks, use centralized solution, or designed for homogeneous SDN environments. This study proposes a blockchain-based security framework to address existing security gaps within heterogeneous SDN environments. The framework establishes a decentralized, robust, and interoperable security layer for distributed SDN controllers. By utilizing the Ethereum blockchain with customized smart contract-based checks, the proposed approach enables mutual authentication among controllers, secures data exchange, and controls network access. The framework effectively mitigates common SDN threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM), false data injection, and unauthorized access. Experimental results highlight the practicality of the solution, achieving a stable throughput of approximately 20 transactions per second with an average authentication latency of 28-40 ms. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework not only enhances inter-controller communication security but also maintains the network performance, making it a reliable and scalable solution for real-world SDN deployments.
Source: PeerJ Computer Science
Institutions: King Abdulaziz University, Taibah University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,395
OpenAlex ID: W4410755129