A Systematic Literature Review of Offensive and Defensive Security Solutions With Software Defined Network

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the most significant innovations in telecommunication systems in the past two decades. From the very beginning, the scientific community understood the importance of investigating the possible usages of SDN as a means to increase network security, but also their potential to be exploited as an attack device. For this reason, there has been a massive production of research works, which, however, do not form a well-defined corpus. The literature is spread over many venues and composed of contributions with very different flavors. Though some review works already exist, in this work we conduct a systematic literature review of the field, gathering 466 relevant publications— the largest curated dataset on the topic to the best of our knowledge. In our work, the dataset undergoes a twofold analysis: (a) quantitative, through publication metadata, which allows us to chart publication outlets, approaches, and tackled issues; (b) qualitative, through 14 research questions that provide an aggregated overview of the literature contributions to the key issues, also to spot gaps left open. From these analyses, we derive a call for action to address the main open challenges.

Keywords

• Attack
• defense
• mitigation
• security
• SDN
• threat