Security: a Killer App for SDN?

Software Defined Networking SDN has been developed rapidly and is now used by early adopters such as data centres. It offers immediate capital cost savings by replacing proprietary routers with commodity switches and controllers the use of computer science abstractions in network management offers operational cost savings, with performance and functionality improvements too. However, there is a third class of benefits, that will come into their own once SDN is deployed in less controlled environments and that is security. Traditional network architectures have many points of serious failure the compromise of a single router can lead to significant attacks. SDN enables network designers to limit the damage that compromised switches can do, and thus can support more resilient and survivable networks in environments where opponents may have access to some of the infrastructure. In this paper we discuss the security aspects of SDN, and the possible opportunities that result.